BtB Forum

It’s a tricky one to find an audience for because it ticks so many boxes – it’s a little bit DIY, a little bit exquisite corpse, a little bit open composition, a little bit lo-fi tape experiment, a little bit field recording, a little bit installation, a little bit performance, and 100% collaborative to the extent that no single individual can claim credit.  What are the nearest points of comparison?

Yeah, the 12 hour duration was suggested because of my involvement in the Hakarl36 show. Must be getting a dodgy reputation!

Performances elsewhere are definitely welcome!

Kev - Maybe look into getting hold of a car park as a performance space for White Night?

I like the pureness of projecting a Sine Wave into a car park. It could be a nice development of this project, although if that was the focus then maybe 30 minutes wouldn't be needed? One of the things I like about the long recording session is the sound made by people coming through, using the machines and clip clopping around talking in reverby indistinctness. If the focus was more on the car park itself would you be wanting all these?

For me it would also make recording much harder - one of the things I like about the way its going now is that I can turn up with a recorder and a Recorder and get on with it. As we haven't actually visited a car park with a car yet, it'd be a drag taking some kind of amplification with us.

And of course having a car would cut out the opportunity to drink first and record later.

Geoff

Sounds like you had a good performance.

Your comments re:sine wave make sense from one point of view, and as single persons composition it would have that 'bloody mindedness' that can make things a success but it would be less sprawling and interpretive than this seems.

I like the idea of 12 hrs of it. It wasn't what I'd imagined, in fact somehow I'd imagined only a half hr performance but with replaying tapes on different machines (and I'm guessing with varrying lagg as it takes time to swap tapes from machines to machines) but I'm guessing that gives a nice way to adjust dynamics from a single tape to multiple tapes, with varying adjustments of hiss, background noise, throb, and tones.

I definitely want to get it done down this way in some capacity I can get involved in. I think Geoff is right that White Night would be a) a good place to do the multihour performance and b) a good chance to get the use of a carpark.

also I will be (hopefully) out of my phd by then and back in the world of real people.

Hey all - just spring cleaning our SoundCloud, as we're nearing our twelve hour limit. It'd pointless having the reference tone on there, so I'm moved it to SendSpace - http://www.sendspace.com/folder/n0i0xh

We're doing Twelve Tapes for the next Southampton Bang the Bore, 12th May. If you live in the North and want to be part of this then let me know - if there are enough people to split the fuel costs then I'll drive down from Leeds for it.

Sine waves in car parks - it'd be identical to this methodology, just using sine waves. Much more about how the acoustic environment and playback systems alter a pure tone... also more challenging for the performer, unless it's run more like an installation without live performances. I think it'd be a much stronger piece, more elegant, a better exploration of what the piece is doing - but it's admittedly harder to record and involves less in the way of individual expression.

As to whether we do it, I'm not fussed either way. I'll probably do it myself at some point now that I've got all these tape decks off Freecycle.

I've got eleven tape decks now, by the way. Does anyone want to donate the twelfth?

If you do Twelve Tapes pt2: This Time It's Sine Waves, I'll do a couple.

Do you need many more version 1 car park recordings?

Yeah, I'm still collecting for the version we've agreed here.

If I do another version with sine waves then I'll organise that on the Borum if there's interest, but otherwise I'll either do it myself or involve specific interested parts via email. Not sure how to play that yet - part of me thinks that using identical equipment for each one might be important, I haven't decided.

Twelve Tapes - Gallery II, Bradford - 23.03.2012. by twelvetapes

A better quality download, and a front page article including photos and video, to follow. But here you go all - the fruit of our labour.

I'm about an hour in - going to stick it on in the background for most of today. Surprised at how dense it feels. I mean, that was kind of obvious but I was half expecting something pretty discrete - it's surprisingly bleak-sounding. It's a bit Scelsi and a bit spectral. Arrows.

Hmm. Sudden thought - we've got 12 hours of this, 36 hours of supernormal - that's two days already; how about we aim for a week with BtB boxset by 2013?

There's some dying elephant sounds at about 53 minutes into hour 3 - what's them then?

Kev said: There's some dying elephant sounds at about 53 minutes into hour 3 - what's them then?

Bouncy ball on bamboo skewer, run across the inner surface of stainless steel sink. The same method is producing that ringing harmonic note, but it's as difficult to control as bowing metal - hence the elephant tone's in there, too.

Kev said: we've got 12 hours of this, 36 hours of supernormal - that's two days already; how about we aim for a week with BtB boxset by 2013

So we just need 120 hours of material to fill up the box? Are you trying to make the (imminent) Missing Nothing look like our attempt at a hit single?

Bang the bore: the library.

You're supposed to be silent in a library. Or so Doctor Who tells me.

Have you been in a library in the last few years? Maybe it's just the ones I'm in, but the hushed reverence punctuated by crackling leafs is long gone.

All the Bradford documentation (including the above embedded audio stream) is now collected on our front page in the form of an article: http://www.bangthebore.org/archives/3137

The remaining video is uploading as I type this. Enjoy, everyone - I'm really pleased with the results.