Simon Crab - location recording and programming

Andy Wilson - location recording and programming

These recordings are the first result of several years of work. Crab and I had worked together in his group Bourbonese Qualk before starting sunseastar as a separate project with its own agenda. The idea was inspired by listening to Xenakis and thinking about a physicists’ joke about how uncanny it is that nature can solve differential equations instantaneously. The stochastic processes Xenakis uses to construct his music are all around us anyway. From this thought came the idea of taking a short cut around the hard work Xenakis had to do, and making musique concrete based directly on the sound of chaotic processes – the sound of chains rattling, of rain falling, of a field of sheep sounding their bells together, of the sea crashing on the shore, of insects moving through grass.

The location recordings used here were made on a number of recording trips made by the two of us, together and separately.

July 2006 - Portland, Dorset, UK: the main aim of the visit was to record at Chesil beach (OE: ceosol, cisel - shingle), which faces into the storm waves driven by the prevailing south-westerly winds up the English Channel from the Atlantic. It is an 18 mile long beach of flint and chert pebbles that the sea has sorted over the years so that the largest stones are to the east, the smallest to the west. When the waves break on the shore it makes a distinctive sound due to the large scale distribution of the stones. While we were there we also recorded near the lighthouse at Portland Bill, in the quarries across the island (source of the Portland Stone used in so many buildings in the UK, especially in the City of London), and in the tunnels beneath the High Angle Gun Emplacement on top of the island.

April 2007 - Orford Ness, Suffolk, UK: Orford Ness is a shingle spit on the Suffolk coast in Great Britain. For a long time it was Britain's largest military testing ground, used as a bombing range and munitions test area for over half a century. Radar was first tested and developed here, and the ballistics of nuclear weapons was refined in tests carried out here. The area has been described as 'half wilderness, half military junk yard'. We made a number of successful recordings, especially those using contact microphones to capture the sound of wind blowing through the barbed wire that covers the island. We also took the opportunity to visit and record the nearby Sizewell B Nuclear Reactor - the UK's only large pressurised water reactor (PWR).

June 2007 - Fjaerland, Norway: The original idea was to record the movements of retreating glaciers using hydrophones buried in the ice – the nearby glaciers Bøyabreen and Supphellebreen are branches of Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier on the European continent. As it turned out, the hydrophone recordings were not entirely successful, but I made other recordings in Fjaerland and at other places visited en route. A chance encounter with a remote junkyard in Ulvik was particularly useful, as was a visit to Saltstraumen, near Bodø in the north of Norway. Saltstraumen is the largest maelstrom in the world, where up to 400 million cubic meters of seawater forces its way through a 150 meter wide strait every six hours. The speed of the stream is estimated to be up to 40 km per hour. Huge whirlpools are formed, sometimes as much as 15 meters in diameter.

The recordings were then heavily treated and processed - we wanted to use the textures of location sounds but obscure their sources so that the listener focuses on the form of the sound irrespective of its origin. Recordings were occluded by filtering, stretching and reversing them, by manipulating them in the stereo field, by mixing them incongruously, as well as by processing them through programs created specifically to draw out the chaotic surface of the sound. Occasionally the quality of a particular sound made it counter-productive to alter it too much - in those cases you might easily be able to tell what the source was – but always we tried to steer away from cinematic sound (‘film for the ears’) toward something more abstract and singular.

Through the careful placement of microphones the recording process itself was geared toward capturing unusual and unnatural aspects of sound - the microphones were used as lenses to pick out what would be of most use in the studio. Often that meant emphasising stereo movement, recording small-scale movements at close range to produce an exaggerated stereo field. Many recordings were made using 'Mid-Side' channels, allowing us to create the stereo field we wanted in the studio, long after the recording was finished.

In some cases we recorded traditional instrumentation - one track consists entirely of a clarinet solo by Crab, recorded in the tunnels on Portland - but, once again, the results were extensively processed on the computer to create entirely new textures.

Finally, the processed sources were treated as distinct layers of sound that could then be run together to create patterns of interference and modulation as they collided. Occasionally we chose to strip away the layers to let individual voices speak for themselves, or we interleaved them. Our aim in every case was that the resulting music should stand on its own feet, without making too obvious either its sources or the way they had been treated.

Andy Wilson
September 2007

Microphones: Shure VP88, Telinga Pro 6 Twin Science, Rode NTG-1, AKG C400 boundaries, Korg CM100 contacts, DolphinEAR hydrophones.
Recorders: Edirol R-09, Sound Devices 702 stereo 24 bit 192 kHz.
Mixers: Sound Devices 302 3-channel
Software: Native Instruments Reaktor (programmable modular software studio), Steinberg Wavelab 6 (editing and mastering studio)

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Ed Pinsent Didn't Like It

sunseastar offer a very artistic set of field recordings on their Fjærland CD. The idea is apparently something to do with creating musique concrète out of genuinely chaotic processes found in nature, such as ‘insects moving through grass’. In this endeavour they hope to emulate (or perhaps even go one better than) Xenakis, who used stochastic processes to construct his music. The duo of Andy Wilson (author of the excellent book about Faust) and Simon Crab, both of whom have been associated with Bourbonese Qualk, accordingly travelled to various exciting locations over the last two years, documented what they may, and brought back these eight cuts. All the sounds we hear have been extensively reworked, of course. What’s rather worrying so far that (a) the chosen locations include all the usual suspects already used by everyone from Chris Watson to Disinformation – a pebble beach, glaciers in Norway, a military testing ground, and a nuclear reactor; and (b) how boring and tidy the music sounds, despite their avowed interest in the exciting powers of ‘chaos’. Well, score one for the insects! Still, there is clearly intelligence and research operating here, so I will persevere.

The Sound Projector