Artists
Album Info
Release Date: 2023-05-19Label: Mortality Tables
LIFEFILES are creative exchanges.Recordings of places, people, objects, moments in time, environments and quotidian events are shared with a range of artists working with sound. Those artists are then free to respond to the recordings in any way they like, either through manipulation or composition.
The LIFEFILES series includes contributions from Simon Fisher Turner, Veryan, Xqui, Rupert Lally and Andrew Spackman.
Produced and mixed by Dave Clarkson, May 2023
Source recordings: Mat Smith
Design: Neil Coe
29 November 2022: I recorded the sound of passengers chatting on a redeye flight from London’s Heathrow to Glasgow, Scotland. The conversation was dull, punctuated by coughing and laughter and was far too loud for that time in the morning.
Moments after I stopped recording, the pilot announced that all passengers needed to completely power down any devices as he was going to initiate an automated landing. There was fog on the ground at Glasgow, and he advised that any devices still switched on could interfere with the landing sequence. I’ve never seen people turn off their devices so quickly.
An eerie silence settled over the cabin, leaving only the throb and hum of the engines. It occurred to me that if we crashed, the very last things I would have heard would possibly be the inane chatter of the passengers sat around me.
30 November 2022: I recorded the sound of passengers chatting on an early evening flight from Edinburgh, Scotland to London’s Heathrow. The conversation was, again, nothing special, but at a volume that suggested a lack of social awareness or possibly too many beers in an airport bar.
The recording was made on the approach to Heathrow. We were well below the clouds and just a few metres above the runway when the pilot aborted the landing and sharply ascended back over the airport. I have forgotten the reason why, but it again occurred to me that if we’d crashed, the last thing I would have heard was passengers chatting, mostly about golf and possibly trainers.
I sent the recordings, along with an explanation of what happened after each one, to Dave Clarkson (Scissorgun, Spectral Bazaar) who felt they were sufficiently interesting to use as the basis for a piece for the LIFEFILES series. Clarkson imagined that they were not my haphazard in-flight iPhone recordings, but audio files retrieved from an aircraft’s black box recorder.
The source sounds were then burnt to a CD-R, which was distressed using a marker pen. When played, the black pen marks caused the disc to skip and stutter, yielding unpredictable noises and inchoate rhythms.
Clarkson added sparse synthesiser sounds and applied the trademark approach to sound design that has characterised albums such as 'A Pocket Guide To Dream Land', 'A Pocket Guide To Wilderness' and 'A Pocket Guide To Subterrania'. Quite quickly, Clarkson realised he had the framework for more than one track, the result being the ten tracks on 'Black Box Files’, a mini-album representing Clarkson’s contribution to the LIFEFILES series.
All proceeds from this release will be paid to CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably, which Clarkson selected as the charity for this release. The original CD-R used to create the faltering source sounds is available from the Mortality Tables Bandcamp page as a unique art object, with the sale proceeds again going to CALM.
thecalmzone.net
daveclarkson.bandcamp.com
A Mortality Tables Product
MTP18