If Wet at Supersonic is a little different, though, because Sam normally contributes a rambling blog post to the Supersonic Collective Memory, so we felt we ought to provide a few photos (taken by David during the event) at least.

We spoke about our project Descent first. If you are very quick you may still catch it at Millenium Point.

Then we had Sarah Kenchington talk, followed by Ryan Jordan. This led on to an extended Run What Ya Brung section, co-run by Stryx, with presentations by various artists. The day finished with wonderful performances by Sarah Kenchington and Graham Dunning.

Here are some pictures and a few lines about what went on.

We have rooted around for some reviews but most reviewers seem to have stuck to the main stages. Here are a couple of exceptions – 1 / 2.

We enjoyed what the former said of Sarah Kenchington, “It really felt like she summed up everything Supersonic was actually about – pushing the limits of what music is and how we should think about it.”

It was a delight to behold. Thank you to everyone who presented and performed, and to all of you who came to witness it.

Next up, we are off on tour to four village halls across the country. We are delighted with the line-up. Have a look and buy tickets HERE. JOIN US.

We did it! From what started as a bit of experiment, we seemed to build some momentum over our first season, topped off by our Season Finale and Fundraiser event at the end of November 2013. It was a stressful event, due in part to this, but it also felt like a triumphant celebration of all we had achieved in our first season. Many fond memories, and we even raised some money.

We would like to thank everyone who made our first season and fundraiser a success. People were generous beyond our wildest expectations. Below is a picture of Sarah Angliss playing at our fundraiser. Sarah has supported throughout but our thanks extend to so many people that we aren’t even going to attempt a list. Hopefully you know who you are, we certainly do.

Our fundraising efforts raised just over £1200. Not bad for a sound art event in a rural village hall. Read on to find out what 2014 holds.

Onward

In order to make this sustainable, we have set a budget of £400 for each If Wet. Therefore the funds we have raised so far will cover three events in the village hall in 2014. We are now looking for funding for additional events in this our home venue. We hope that potential funders will see the effort and outcomes of our first season and will be willing to match our own fundraising. We’ll see. We’d certainly love to do more events in our hall this year, since this is where the heart of If Wet lies.

Once we see how we get on with our search for funding, we will define our programme at Callow End Village Hall, but for now we just wanted to provide this update and statement of intent.

Also, If Wet has grown wings and will take flight in 2014, stopping to perch at a variety of venues – occasionally with a subtly different format. First up, we have been asked by Flatpack Festival to host an If Wet as part of their festival this year. The second If Wet outing of the year will be the Southbank Centre, when we host a Meet The Makers event. Then we are talking with Capsule about a potentially very exciting event in April. More details on all of these soon but we are delighted to be keeping such fabulous company!

AND we secured funding through Sound and Music, which will see us tour some village halls this year.

Wowee! Thanks again to all who have supported us.

ONWARD.

If Wet #7 is our last fully documented event of the year, as for our fundraiser we decided to enjoy ourselves in celebration of our first season. Here is the full audio recording, in two parts: Part1 / Part2

Here’s an overview of what went on, so you can access topics of interest:

Welcome

MortonUnderwood present…

[1:30 – 22:05 | Part 1]

“The main reason that it’s in a trolley is that if you move this trolley around, as you move over differently reflective areas it changes pitch.”

“Getting the backing off the tape proved to be the most challenging thing because Sam has got no fingernails and I’ve got bad eyesight.”

“What we have done is take the optical reader for the synth and put it under the trolley, and then any design on the floor sequences the sound as you move it across it.”

“David insisted on this humiliation for me on a regular basis.”
[Sam talking about completing a touch circuit using Sam’s head – pictured above]

“The reaction from the public was ‘this is really fascinating’. […] Now I wouldn’t have expected that reaction but it was a solid repeated reaction. They don’t know what contact mics sound like.”
[David talking about the addition of a contact mic to the underside of the trolley top]

Ian Rawes

[20:05 – 1:03:00 | Part 1]
First we welcomed Ian Rawes of the British Library Sound Archive and London Sound Survey to present a series of fascinating archival recordings.

“They are called transcriptions discs. They are old 78 RPM discs and they’ve got programmes and out-takes, and some things which were never broadcast at all. […] The BBC don’t actually know about a lot of these things, or they’ve forgotten about them. When I first came across them I was very excited because you hear another world of sound.”

“I am interested in the sounds of everyday life, not really the great and the good being interviewed, which is what the vast majority of the old recordings are.”

“The earliest microphones or recording equipment was very insensitive to sound. […] They are always shouting; you get the impression people were very angry or very emphatic.”

“The very oldest, surviving public recording in Britain […] is from Crystal Palace in 1888. […] Handel’s Messiah performed by a 4000-strong choir. […] It has a certain quality as you will hear.”
[Ian describing the remarkable recording which begins at 01:00:30]

Helen White

[00:10 – 30:05 | Part 2]
Our final presentation of 2013, was by Helen White who brought along her wonderful solar-wind chime to show us.

“It’s a solar-wind chime that gathers data from the sun. It’s not everyday that you look at data from satellites and turn it into magnetic resonance, so I will try to explain how we got there.”

“The sun is ninety-three million miles away and it’s spewing charred particles at us all the time. […] These particles have different effects depending on all sorts of properties in them.”

“The three characters of the solar wind are: its speed, its density and the magnetic direction that the particles are facing. […] That’s what this piece of work focusses on; it reads the speed of the wind and interprets it through a series of sounds.”

“The data comes from a satellite called ACE.”

“I love the idea that it can be so gentle and subtle. In fact, I had this on my desk, it was playing and I switched off from it. It was kind of like that ticking clock, it just disappears.”

Run What Ya Brung

We run a regular feature at If Wet in which members of the audience are invited to bring along and demonstrate instruments, sound objects and sonic oddities. For the first time nobody presented anything in this section, in part due to our regular contributors being away. A shame but this did result in is another first; we finished on time!

________________________________________

The full set of Pete’s photographs of If Wet are available here.
 

Here is the full audio recording, in two parts: Part1 / Part2

Here’s an overview of what went on, so you can access topics of interest:

Welcome

MortonUnderwood present…

[1:30 – 22:05 | Part 1]

“In April of this year I was appointed as the Artist-in-Residence at the Town Hall Symphony Hall in Birmingham, […] because they don’t do weird very well.”

“The police were about to send in a robot […] to blow it up!”
[Sam discussing the first Sonic Graffiti piece to appear in Symphony Hall]

“We didn’t want to put labels saying this is the microphone, this is the record button, this is the loudspeaker; we wanted it to be something you could intuit.”
[David discussing our ‘A Word In Your Ear’ sound art piece]

“This is what happens when Sam and I have a 20 minute phone call about how we might put it in a box and what we might do about the user interface to make it easy to tell which bit to speak into. It’s quite worrying really that it winds up looking like something out of a David Cronenberg movie.”

Soundhog

[22:20 – 1:01:25 | Part 1]
Ben Soundhog introduced his production techniques and work on his piece Whole Lotta Helter Skelter bastard pop piece.

“I’ve always had this kind of fascination with messing up other people’s work, whether they like it or not.”

“I used to have an Atari 800 […] and you could have I think it was 7 seconds in total in samples, which you then split up into eight […] but there was enough there so you could start nicking notes off people’s records. “

“He put out two singles out. They were both under the counter because they were, in terms of copyright, completely illegal.”

“It has gone into the mainstream. I hear stuff now using whacking great big chunks of other peoples music. That is a direct line from what we were doing; it did have an effect. We were always hoping that we’d get involved but of course what happens in the music industry, they take it themselves, they squish it down into something they can deal with and then they make the money out of it – then they are all happy.”

“This is why everybody would use stuff like the Beastie Boys because the vocal tracks were easily available; they were always on the B-side of the 12 inch single. […] But what has happened in recent years […] there were a couple of console games out, one called Rock Band and one called Guitar Hero, […] and this is how much clout the gaming industry developed, they actually were able to go to the record companies dig out the multi-track masters and use them as the basis of the samples in the game.”

“I know a lot of people don’t like you messing with things that are, you know, sacred but […] it’s not like the originals don’t exist any more. If you want to hear it as it is then it’s there for you but if you want just something a bit different then so long as it’s not a complete mess I think you should be able to have a go at this.”

“To be honest I’ve never had much feedback from people but one of the guitar players out of Paul McCartney’s current touring band, which is fantastic, and Jimmy Page’s website had it on their front page, so they must be alright with it.”

soundhog.blogspot.co.uk

Graham Dunning

[00:10 – 53:35 | Part 2]
Graham Dunning discusses and demonstrates his project Music by the Metre.

“It’s based on an idea by Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, […] he’s founding member of the situationist movement and Italian painter and also chemist and he came up with industrial painting, Painting by the Metre. […] My version is an audio homage to that technique.”

“I’ve got some machines which create some abstract music which I then use to fill up a spool of tape. […] So what I’ll do is set up the machines until it’s making something resembling something musical and then that’s the end of my intervention with it. […] I just leave it to run, fill up all of one side of the tape and then turn it over and fill up the other side.”

“The idea of vertical music is that it’s always changing but it’s always the same, and it’s never changing but it’s never the same.”

“I am going to set up one of these machines now today and as I go along I am going to describe what the sources are. So, I’ll just start doing that.”

“I am also using a rock from just outside to hold the back end of the tonearm hopefully to make it loop on the same bit so it doesn’t spiral towards the middle.”

“Next up, I’ve got another turntable, which has been slightly butchered. […] I’ve taken out the original motor and have put in this kind of hobby motor, which has an adjustable speed on it. […] It goes from quite slow to being much faster than a normal record player.”

“Just trying to find a certain record. They are all unlabelled so I can’t remember which one it was. […] These are some dubplates that I got made of different field recordings I recorded myself. […] This is the sound of, I put some cymbals out in the rain each with a contact mic on.”

“The longer you listen to it the more you can hear.”

“This microphone is going out the window to get some traffic noise, or in a more academic way of putting it, live environmental sound.”

“There is quite a nice sweep to even regular traffic and I think in the context of quite a noise-heavy conversation between these different sounds it can change the composition. […] Over the course of the tape it’s actually different all the way through.”

“One final element, inside this tape is a loop of cassette. […] This is from a remix I did for a saxophone player called Colin Webster. […] To remix one of his tracks I recorded it out to tape and then made up sixteen of these cassettes of little snippets and then played eight of them together. […] All slightly different, so they go in and out of sync together.”

“So, I am happy with that as the composition as it is going to be. The last bit to do is switch the tape on so, start it running and just leave it recording until it has filled both sides of the tape.”

“That’s it, it’s going and it’s out of my hands!.”

grahamdunning.com

Run What Ya Brung

[54:54 – 01:03:54 | Part 2]
We run a regular feature at If Wet in which members of the audience are invited to bring along and demonstrate instruments, sound objects and sonic oddities. This month we had a great contribution from our regular contributor Richard Windley.

Richard Windley

[54:54 – 01:03:54 | Part 2]

“I’ve got a couple of quite nice handmade guitars that I’ve had for years and I’ve gradually got more and more frustrated with them. […] I thought maybe I’d better design one that I like […] so I designed and built this one a few years ago. […] This thing I’ve only added recently and it was an attempt to do this thing which Indian instruments and some European instruments like hurdy gurdies often have these things called sympathetic strings […] to broaden the range of the sound and to give me more sustain.”

richardwindley.co.uk

________________________________________

This is the first month Pete Ashton was unable to attend If Wet, so we don’t have the usual photographs on his Flickr BUT the wonderful George Benson stepped in to help, so thank you to him for the great photos of If Wet #6 used in this post.

Here is the full audio recording, in three parts: Part1 / Part2 / Part3

Here’s an overview of what went on, so you can access topics of interest:

Welcome

“We set up If Wet […] as a bit of an antidote to the rock/blues nights there are throughout the region. We didn’t really feel there was a requirement for another one of those, so we decided to set this up.”

Nikki Pugh

[03:30 – 36:45 | Part 1]
Nikki Pugh introduced us to her work related to space and in particular her project Score for heavy objects and built environment.

“You know there is this whole drive to make technology smaller, more invisible, I just like the idea of going ‘Raggghh here it is!’, and I’ve got to carry it.”
[Nikki discussing her huge, heavy tubes used for this project]

“Inside them […] a micro-controller. As small computer, based on the Arduino platform. It’s three things really: it’s little PCBs with computer chips on them, it’s also software that is designed for artists to use, and a massive support community as well.”

“Inside here I’ve got two GPS receivers […] just the raw component. […] and a solenoid.”

“I view these as this kind of expanded, augmented sense, and use it to pull people’s attention to the built environment around them in different ways. […] I walked down New Street in Birmingham and because I was carrying this kind of equipment with me, suddenly noticed OH! there are trees all down New Street. Just because it made me raise my eye-line and look up. […] To try and make people tune in in different ways.”

“We’re just going to play you some of the data recorded on the walk. […] It’s the data themselves played back in the same way that they tap as you carry them around. […] It’s quite a direct link back to all that sweating and swearing.”

“Because it’s quite an abstract process I wanted to give you the opportunity to experience these yourselves.”

We all head outside with the Heavy Objects.

npugh.co.uk

Kathy Hinde

[00:20 – 55:00 | Part 2]
Kathy Hinde discusses her project Vocal Migrations and the influences that led her to create the project.

“My background is working with music and visual art. I’ve never really wanted to decide between the two, I’ve always wanted to do both.”

“I got involved with an organisation called COMMA, which stands for Contemporary Music Making for Amateurs. That’s using the word amateur in its original meaning, which means for the love of it.”

“We were doing full orchestra pieces that were for wine glasses, fire extinguishers and you know, cellos and violins and pianos. […] The way that some of the composers chose to deal with this mixed ensemble of different abilities and maybe odd instrument combinations were really interesting. There were all sorts of different strategies.”

“One of the pieces was working with the composer Terry Riley. […] COMMA did the UK première of this piece with Terry Riley. […] Terry Riley was conducting. Not really realising the significance of how great this guy is; these were really formative experiences.”

“Moving on to my piece Vocal Migrations, I wanted to work with this idea of an open score.”

“There is so much in nature that creates incredible complex beauty that works with very, very simple rules.”

“It’s inspired by how bats use sound to see. […] There is a guy in America called Daniel Kish who is blind who has taught himself to echolocate using clicks.”

“It’s this idea of creating a situation or a behaviour for people to be immersed in. I think once you remove sight then there is something quite interesting happens in terms of having to trust this device, having to really listen […] and there is this point at which you really relax into it, and sort of go I’m OK, I can just use my listening to these sounds to make sense of my environment.”

kathyhinde.co.uk

Run What Ya Brung

[01:05:14 – 01:16:45 | Part 2]
We run a regular feature at If Wet in which members of the audience are invited to bring along and demonstrate instruments, sound objects and sonic oddities. This month we had a viola da gamba and recorder piece, an iPhone drone app and a bass string drone instrument.

Tim Cranmore and Ange

[00:30 – 12:50 | Part 3]

“We are just going to play a bit of music, if I dare mention the word.”

“The Viola da gamba came before all the other stringed instruments.”

fippleflute.co.uk

Simon Gray

[14:04 – 21:45 | Part 3]

“A lot of us who make drone-based music will have an app called iTablaPro, which as well as having tabla drums has a tanpura, which generates Indian drones. When we are playing drone-based music we don’t always want to have the Indian sound, we might want an electronic sound.”

star-one.org.uk

Richard Windley

[23:10 – 31:07 | Part 3]

“Then I came across this reference to an early instrument called a Trumpet Marine (sic). it was a single stringed instrument and rather than fret it you played the harmonics on it. And then I remembered something a lap steel player showed me and that is if you play a harmonic on an open string and then slide the bar up the harmonic actually follows the note, […] which surprised me.”

richardwindley.co.uk

NOTE: the details at the end of Part 3 of the audio about our November fundraising event are incorrect. Keep your eye on THIS PAGE for details!

________________________________________

The full set of Pete’s photographs of If Wet are available here.
 

Here is the full audio recording, in two parts: Part1 / Part2

Here’s an overview of what went on, so you can access topics of interest:

Welcome

“Actually I don’t know quite what to expect, which is one of the delights of doing If Wet!”

MortonUnderwood present…

[2:20 – 38:36 | Part 1]

World Listening Day

[2:20 – 7:00 | Part 1]
We started by introducing World Listening Day before going on to cover our release on RHP, entitled “Field Augmentation”.

“World Listening Day is to celebrate the practice of listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and acoustic ecology.”

“I don’t know whether you’ve ever experienced a tube journey but it is phenomenally loud sometimes. […] For me those sorts of journeys are fascinating because you have people there who would never normally listen to that sort of sound. I would go to a concert that sounds rather like that […] but a lot of the people on the tube definitely wouldn’t.”

Field Augmentation

[7:00 – 38:36 | Part 1]

“We are very open to all of the chance sounds of course that appear in that setting; of which there are many.”

“[…] has the rather odd effect of sounding, as you’ll hear in a few minutes, like a scrapyard in a cathedral.”

“We are going to play this track in full. It’s about seven minutes long, so this is an endurance listening moment.”

“It’s quite interesting that people seem to be paranoid if you take a camera out but to my surprise it’s the other end of the scale with microphones.”
[David talking about our experience when recording in the field]

“Why is it that one type of sound is acceptable in a certain environment and another type of sound isn’t?”
[Sam talking about the recording of his piece The Bells]

mortonunderwood.co.uk

Laura Kriefman

[00:09 – 01:02:42 | Part 2]
Laura Kriefman introduced us to her work as choreographer, technologist and sound artist.

“I came up with this ludicrous theory […] which is that the more labour saving devices we’ve found, the less we have rhythm in our body.”
[Laura discussing why we find dancing increasingly awkward]

“So, I started this plan to liberate dance. […] I may never achieve it but I am going to keep trying. […] I started taking all our work we were doing and putting it slap bang in the environment people were spending time in, because I wanted to show the way people move every day is beautiful.”

“I wanted to create something which could be installed anywhere, whether it’s a country estate in the middle of a forest or on a street corner. […] The smallest one is small enough to hold and the largest one is large enough to sit on.”
[Laura talking about her Rolling Stones project]

“Would anybody like to touch a Rolling Stone?”

“That’s playing on that base of chaos. It’s a really unusual place to put yourself, to create a piece of work when you know it’s going to tour because you have to make something that’s tourable. So, it has to have a finite form in the programming, it has to last 45 minutes, it has to be suitable for these kinds of people […]”
[Laura discussing applying chaos in her latest work]

Moving on to her mechanical bird building, Laura outlined her approach to making a variety of birds for her latest exhibition.

“How can I create a way for people to look up?”

“Some of the sculptures have very real birds and some of them have imaginary birds, so of course honker birds do not exist, nor do fluster birds. I only brought two of the fluster birds, there will be six living in this nest.”

“All the birds are kenetic and hand manipulated because actually it’s more fun.”

“For the final one I need five volunteers!”

guerilladanceproject.com

Run What Ya Brung

[01:05:14 – 01:16:45 | Part 2]
We run a regular feature at If Wet in which members of the audience are invited to bring along and demonstrate instruments, sound objects and sonic oddities. This month our regular contributor Richard Windley brought down his self-built Stroh guitar and amplifier. Once again, a remarkable rarity demonstrated in our village hall!

Richard Windley

[01:05:14 – 01:16:45 | Part 2]

“The original Strohs were made out of some sort of nickle and aluminium alloys, which I guess were cutting-edge in the early nineteen hundreds. […] What Stroh did was he took part of the energy from the bridge and he pivoted it and brought this little arm down onto this very, very thin diaphragm, which is spun aluminium.”

richardwindley.co.uk

Once again, the event ended with a lot of people sticking around to chat. One of the core aims of If Wet it to build links locally. We are confident there are people who share our interests out there and we’d like to hook up with them to form some sort of creative community. Another successful If Wet, see you at the next one!

________________________________________

The full set of Pete’s photographs of If Wet are available here.
 

Here is the full audio recording, in two parts: Part1 / Part2

Here’s an overview of what went on, so you can access topics of interest:

Welcome

“I am aware that some of you know this, as some of you have been to every single If Wet.”

MortonUnderwood present…

[2:52 – 17:20 | Part 1]

Foghorn Requiem recording

[6:36 – 09:31 | Part 1]
We played back a recording of the Foghorn Requiem David made when we travelled up to South Shields the weekend before If Wet #3. In many senses, this was the first of what could potentially become a series of If Wet sonic outings…

“This is the finale. There is a mournful chorale at the end from the brass bands and then it goes to the foghorn part and they discharge the full extent of the air chambers through the foghorn, so you hear how the sound meanders and peters out.”

“They explained that normally they wouldn’t run the foghorn like that but […] because it was the last time it was ever going to be sounded properly they ran the cylinders right until everything was completely depleted and run out, which is why it sounds particularly mournful.”

3D mouthpieces

[9:36 – 17:20 | Part 1]
Next up, we provided a brief update on our work building 3D mouthpieces. David described and demonstrated a working saxophone mouthpiece.

“The software has been upgraded now so the rafts are much easier to come off in one piece.”

“I now need to re-learn some of the fundamentals so I am getting to the stage where I am building models myself.”
[Sam reflecting on what’s next in terms of our exploration of 3D printing]

Paul John presents the clavichord

[17:25 – 44:00 | Part 1]
Paul John discusses the history of clavichords, which featured him playing in-the-round.

“It’s closer to the piano in its expressiveness than it is to the harpsichord.”

“In the 18th century it was often used in stacks, in pairs, […] so that an organist could practice at home.”

“It came out of, probably, ancient Greek methods of teaching mathematics, the acoustics of music from a single stretched string between two points and finding that if you put pressure on the string here and there that you get the fundamental and the octave.”

The courtesy and attentiveness of an If Wet audience is always high (they have to put up with us blathering on after all) but in this section it was particularly tangible. The volume of the clavichord is such that it rewards close listening. It was a delight to behold how enchanted everyone looked when Paul was playing.

Next up, Sarah Angliss.

Sarah Angliss

[1:07 – 52:31 | Part 2]

“That’s the act. I genuinely don’t know quite what it is; it sort of lives somewhere between cabaret and experimental electronics.

“You actually imbue notes with life by sort of expressing yourself as you play the note. And on the recorder you have a very good parallel with what is going on with the clavichord.

“There is a roboticist, Rodney Brooks who said “The real world is its own best model”. […] You might spend a vast amount of money on bell samples but in the end the best bell sample is a bell, situated in a room, vibrating away as only bells can do. […] We are actually quite hungry for physical, situated sound. That’s something I am very, very into.

As a keen saw player, Sarah moves on to discuss and demonstrate the saw as a musical instrument.

“It was like the skiffle instrument of its time. It was what you did if you couldn’t afford a violin.”
[Sarah talking about saws as a musical instrument]

The discussion moved on to focus on performance and Sarah’s thoughts on this.

“Coupling; which is the idea that when I see a performance I want to see what the performer is doing, coupled in some obvious way to what we are hearing. Otherwise I will switch off.”

“Why are we all here sharing this sound rather than just simply listening to it at home?”

“You’ll notice at the beginning that I tuned up in front of you. I didn’t actually need to tune up in front of you. I do that before I start a show so that people realise I am controlling the sound, and I am not reacting to the sound.”
[Sarah talking about helping the audience to appreciate the cause and effect when she plays Theremin]

“People credit him with a lot more intelligence than he actually has. […] I am actually using old magician’s tricks, lots of misdirections.”
[Talking about her robot, Hugo]

Sarah moves on to discuss and demonstrate her phonograph.

“This is entirely clockwork sound, there is no electronic amplification whatsoever.”
[Demonstrating a recording.]

“It has not escaped out notice that the voices of the dead can be reheard.”
[Quoting Scientific American response to the phonograph when originally demonstrated.]

Members of the If Wet audience were then given the opportunity to make a recording on the phonograph. A short piece was recorded featuring the voices of Tim Cranmore (Worcestershire Poet Laureate), Sarah Angliss and David Morton on saxophone.

“You would have to remove that stylus and replace it with a heavier one. And then you spoke into the horn, the horn would vibrate the stylus and it was heavy enough to cut the groove in the wax.”
[On how to record using a phonograph]

“It’s an artefact of the recording process. How you have to perform and the way it gets filtered. So, it makes you start to realise that this idea of how old voices sound is often the recording process rather than the people.”
[On how to record using a phonograph]

Run What Ya Brung

[41:32 – 57:00 | Part 2]
We run a regular feature at If Wet in which members of the audience are invited to bring along and demonstrate instruments, sound objects and sonic oddities. Sometimes we get lots of contributions, sometimes just one (so far never nought). This month was stellar, with fabulous contributions from Caroline Radcliffe, Richard Windley and Tim Cranmore.

Caroline Radcliffe

[54:00 – 1:03:58 | Part 2 | pre-amble by Sarah Angliss]
Caroline Radcliffe demonstrated some clog dancing and spoke about how many of the moves, from the 18th century, imitated the machinery in the cotton mills.

“I get really fed up with all these techno people claiming that they’ve only just invented something. What I want to show is that repetitive labour and sound was connected way before Detroit techno and all sorts of other processes.”

Caroline Radcliffe

Richard Windley

[01:05:46 – 01:10:24 | Part 2]
We can’t get enough of Richard at If Wet and he was back with a bizarre self-made synth on a multi-layered stand.

“The band broke up after about four days.”

richardwindley.co.uk

Tim Cranmore

[01:10:50 – 01:20:54 | Part 2]
Tim is a local recorder maker and maker/player in the UK Vegetable Orchestra. This was his second contribution to If Wet, where he covered three-holed pipes, including two rare bass pipes.

“In the Mary Rose they found several musical instruments. […] The bass three-holed pipe they found was the only one that had ever been seen, and this is a copy of a bass three-holed pipe that was found in the Mary Rose.”

fippleflute.co.uk

Once again, the event ended with a lot of people sticking around to chat. One of the core aims of If Wet it to build links locally. We are confident there are people who share our interests out there and we’d like to hook up with them to form some sort of creative community. Another successful If Wet, see you at the next one!

________________________________________

The full set of Pete’s photographs of If Wet are available here.
 

Here is the full audio recording, in two parts: Part1 / Part2

Here’s an overview of what went on, so you can access topics of interest:

Welcome

“If at any point in proceedings you want to interject, ask a question, just stick your hand up. We have a very open forum throughout all of this!”

MortonUnderwood present…

[2:52 – 51:20 | Part 1]

Noise box synths and optical sequencer

[2:52 – 34:08 | Part 1]
We brought along three of our Game Conroller noise box synths, a stereo noise box (codenamed THE BEAST), a controller in a Spam tin and our prototype optical sequencer to demo.

“Arguably the standard format for these sorts of noise boxes is for them to be a drone noise box. [demo] […] What we wanted to do with these, this particular model, is make something that’s a bit more playable, so you can be quite rhythmical. [demo]”
[Talking about our Game Controller format synths]

“It’s simulating what it is like if the battery goes flat. […] controlling the amount of flatness your battery has, rather than having to have a selection of batteries that you pop in.”
[Talking about power-starve on our synths]

All the synths we build have at least one oscillator wired out to two photo ports, to allow the functionality to be extended via anything that provides a resistance value.

“We’re all going to try and hold hands. […] We’ll see how successful this is.”
[Talking about the synth extension and touch contacts]

“the extension allows you to design something that does for you what you want to do in your liveset”
[Talking about the synth extension and how it allows for easy controller customisation]

Next up David demonstrated the optical sequencer he has built, which again can wire into the extension port of our synths.

“we call this, as a sort of working title, the Pocket Oramics”
[Referencing part of the history surrounding our optical sequencer]

“Part of the thinking with these is that they can be made cheaply enough so that they can be bought by anyone that wishes to experiment. “
[Talking about our optical sequencer relative to others before it]

“The suggestion was that you could have one mechanical device that is pulling this strip through and another mechanical device that had a pen on it, which was then writing on it.”
[Talking about an idea for a generative sequencer suggested at If Wet #1]

3D printed tuba mouthpiece

[34:08 – 51:04 | Part 1]
During If Wet #2 we were running a “MarkerBot Replicator 2” 3D printer at the back of the hall. It printed a tuba mouthpiece. We had a pre-prepared (filed and sanded) version of this mouthpiece with us, which we demonstrated attached to Sam’s tuba.

“Quick Google, mouthpiece.stl, oh look somebody has put up a CAD design for a trombone mouthpiece. Trouble is I don’t know any trombone players. […] Quick Google, find out how long a tuba mouthpiece is, take the trombone mouthpiece dimensions and just make one that’s the same length, and let all the other dimensions go.”

“The interesting point is you can now choose to do things you couldn’t normally do with a conventional mouthpiece. […] I could take a pressure driver, a loudspeaker in a can, a pipe, build one of these with a pipe attachment and I can now have a sequence of notes playing through here while Sam plays another sequence on the tuba. […] I have no idea whether that will sound interesting, horrible, exciting, good, bad, or indifferent, but I bet nobody has done that before.”
[Talking about the melting point of 3D printed PLA material]

“So a PLA teapot isn’t quite a chocolate teapot but it’s well on the way to being a chocolate teapot.”
[Talking about the melting point of 3D printed PLA material]

mortonunderwood.co.uk

Juneau Projects

[00:35 – 41:00 | Part 2]
It was a delight having Juneau Projects come down to talk about their project “Blackbird in Infospace”, their EP which is downloadable to a USB drive at “shrines” throughout Worcester. They also demonstrated their distinctive musical instruments and performed a piece from the EP.

“By the third day we kinda bonded with one another by accidentally breaking one of the artworks”
[Ben talking about how him and Phil first got to know each other]

“You can go to your computer and get almost anything you want delivered to you. We are not against that, that’s a great thing, but we we interested in looking at the the other way around and making something that had elements of deliberately slowing down that process.”
[Phil talking about why they were interested in getting people out and about to download their EP]

“This is the song we mentioned about the guy in the Crusades who flew back to Worcester on a Black Swan.”

juneauprojects.co.uk/

Run What Ya Brung

[41:32 – 57:00 | Part 2]
We run a regular feature at If Wet in which members of the audience are invited to bring along and demonstrate instruments, sound objects and sonic oddities. Thanks to Richard for bringing another great piece to If Wet.

Richard Windley

[58:48 – 1:02:18 | Part 2]
Richard is a Hereford-based artist/maker who is currently working in the field of technical reproductions, created for television and film. His work and experience spans many years. He brought along two of his Theremins to show us.

“You make the first iteration of it, you think that’s good if I did a Mark2 it would be that much better but you never get around to making a Mark2. On to the next project.”
[Talking about his creative process]

richardwindley.co.uk

Once again, the evening ended with a lot of people sticking around to chat. One of the core aims of If Wet it to build links locally. We are confident there are people who share our interests out there and we’d like to hook up with them to form some sort of creative community. Another successful If Wet, see you at the next one!

________________________________________

The full set of Pete’s photographs of If Wet are available here.
 

Our aim is to document each If Wet, starting from “audio only” but moving towards “video, photo and audio”. As our first event involved the inevitable extra stress associated with not really knowing what we were doing, and we were central in presenting a number of pieces of work, even the “audio only” documentation was a little tricky this time. As such we have post-produced the audio we captured for intelligibility above all other considerations. We have split this into two parts for easier listening (and to cut out the tea break) – Part1 / Part2

We thought it might also be useful to provide an overview of what went on, so you can access topics of interest and get a feel for future events. Here is how it went:

Welcome

“[If Wet is…] to give us a rolling monthly deadline in order to demonstrate work in progress, get feedback from an audience and generally have an ethos for ourselves and anyone else who is coming along to demonstrate their working methods, have a bit of a discussion around that; try and learn from one another.”

MortonUnderwood present…

[5:25 – 54:40 | Part 1]

The Placebo Gong Project

[5:25 – 37:36 | Part 1]
Using two C-tuned gongs on loan from CBSO / BCMG we demonstrated our work-in-progress. When this work is completed, musicians will be able to process the sound of their instruments through one or more gongs.

“The aim for the project overall is to get enough power into them with a musical instrument that somebody can play with the [resonant] frequencies of the gong.”

The best indication of how it should sound starts at around 10:30. The distinction here is that we were using a signal generator as the audio source. This doesn’t allow for such an intuitive response from the player, which is likely to be crucial in the development of this project.

“You very soon fall off the end of people’s knowledge about even how the instruments they make work.”
[Talking about how much of our work is at or beyond the edge of conventional thinking / knowledge]

“There’s something very strange going on. This is going to happen a lot at If Wet. That’s partly the point.”
[Talking about the technical difficulties we experienced]

Note: As you will hear from the audio, we experienced a few difficulties when demonstrating this project on the night. We have recordings here (driven with a signal generator) and here (driven with a fretless guitar) that better demonstrate the potential.

The Giant Feedback Organ

[37:36 – 54:40 | Part 1]
Using an extendible length grain blowing pipe (on loan from our local farm) we have been creating a series of low notes, using only the length of the pipe, a microphone, a speaker and an EQ.

“Up the middle of the auditorium, if that’s what this is, you will see a huge pipe. Gill, who is stood over there is the wife of our local farmer, who very kindly lent us these pipes, which normally have grain blown up them, and what we are doing with them is trying to create a feedback organ. […] What we are using is the pipe to determine what note is created, what frequency that feedback fires off at.”

“It’s rather like a bad clarinettist or a bad saxophone player; if you don’t blow it hard enough it will squeak. […] it needs less energy to start it at a higher harmonic than it does on the fundamental. […] You put it [the mic] in, it squeaks, you put the notch in where it squeaks, it’ll squeak at the next one down, you gradually drive it down so that it goes off at the fundamental.”
[Talking about our use of an EQ to drive the frequency down]

“We did briefly make this with two different diameters of pipe, one slid inside the other. So we made the biggest swannee whistle in the world.”
[Talking about our prior testing]

mortonunderwood.co.uk

The Isle of Everywhere

[00:18 – 30:56 | Part 2]
Two-thirds of The Isle of Everywhere kindly filled our main guest slot with an explanation and demonstrating of the complexities of melding traditions and tunings in their dub band, which features tuba, drums and santoor. There was a technical explanation and demonstration of both instruments and the scales they use together, followed by a performance piece to illustrate the results. Stuart also provided a demonstration of some extended tuba techniques after their performance.

“The tuning system we have got for this piece is a westernised version of the modal scheme for the dastgah of Bayat-e-Esfahan”
[Simon talking about his santur tuning for this piece]

“If you bring this fourth valve into play, you can actually play G half-flat.”
[Stuart talking about the “hacks” he applies to get the tuba to play within the context of the santur scale]

twitter.com/IsleOfE

Paul John

[33:15 – 51:56 | Part 2]
Paul will provide regular input at If Wet. He has a history in teaching musical instrument technology. At this If Wet he provided an insight into the development of early stringed keyboard instruments, with particular emphasis on the clavichord.

“It is possibly one of the quietest instruments that has ever evolved.”
[Talking about a clavichord and how it is often best experienced in the round]

Run What Ya Brung

[52:20 – 1:02:18 | Part 2]
We run a regular feature at If Wet in which members of the audience are invited to bring along and demonstrate instruments, sound objects and sonic oddities. We were very lucky to have such great contributions to this slot at the first If Wet.

Tim Cranmore

[52:25 – 58:04 | Part 2]
Tim is a local recorder maker and maker/player in the UK Vegetable Orchestra. He wowed us with a collection of three instruments including: one of his fipple-flutes, a Paetzold contrabass recorder and a recorder made from a carrot – on which he played some Mozart!

“I just want to introduce you to a third fipple-flute. […] It’s in my pocket, you need to keep it damp.”
[Talking about his carrot recorder]

fippleflute.co.uk

Richard Windley

[58:48 – 1:02:18 | Part 2]
Richard is a Hereford-based artist/maker who is currently working in the field of technical reproductions, created for television and film. His work and experience spans many years. He brought along a kinetic sculpture of his to show us.

“What I was hoping to do was take some of the energy out of it and turn the sinewave of the tuning fork into something that was a bit more raucous.”
[Talking about his kinetic sculpture, the “Interstellar Communication Detector”]

richardwindley.co.uk

The evening ended with a lot of people sticking around to chat. One of the core aims of If Wet it to build links locally. We are confident there are people who share our interests out there and we’d like to hook up with them to form some sort of creative community. If Wet #1 was a VERY positive start in that direction!

________________________________________

The full set of Pete’s photographs of If Wet #1 are available here.