Sound Samples and Recordings
Standalone pieces
'Spedber'
I made this piece for the 2011 Klangpanorama competition. the brief was to do "sounds of places and/or landscapes in Europe", and what I have done is collage a lot of the field recordings I've done recently, especially for the 'A Month of Sundays' installation, with time-lapse work, including 'Rush Hour' (see below), to make a piece out of sounds recorded in and around Sedbergh. I think it gets the job done in a way that's direct without being too cheesy ... Simon Whetham was kind enough to include the piece in the 'guests' half of his Active Crossover sound installation at Wolstenholme Creative Space in Liverpool in June 2011.
AndiChapple'Spedber'(2011)_192KbpsCBR.mp3 (5', 7MB, 192 Kbps)
'Call and Response'
AndiChapple'CallAndResponse'(2010)_320KbpsCBR.mp3 (1' 35", 3.7MB, 320 Kbps) - this is a brief excerpt from a recording session I did in St. Andrew's Church for the A Month of Sundays installation. I was recording some whirly tube sounds, and they seem to have attracted the RAF ... the piece was played on CKDU FM in Halifax, Nova Scotia on 5 November 2010 as part of a programme curated by the Centre for Art Tapes, also in Halifax.
'K197'
AndiChapple_K197_192Kbps.mp3 (10', 14MB, 192 Kbps) - this takes the stretching-things-out technique I've used for a lot of music in the past couple of years and puts the spotlight on it; 10 minutes from two bars of piano is quite a stretch. I tried to see how much I could slow things down but still keep enough sense of change to engage the attention. there are two other bars of piano in the middle for light relief, but they take three and a bit minutes. I'm pretty pleased with this - it's deep, lush, floaty ... but not toothless.
'Tonic'
AndiChapple_Tonic_192Kbps.mp3 (1', 1.4MB, 192 Kbps) - this was done for the 2010 60x60 competition, but it didn't get in - at least that made a connection with 60x60, and we had one of this year's mixes for the Sedbergh Music Festival. the piece starts with a recording of the print drying rack in the studio in Lancaster where I was working on screen prints; sine tones take up a set of the harmonics in the sound, which are nearly a nice chord, and resolve the chord over the remaining seconds.
'K197' and 'Tonic' were played on 'sound stations' in St. Fin Barre's cathedral in Cork, Ireland in late July 2010 as part of the activity around the Sonic Vigil V event.
Performances
Lanternhouse, Ulverston, 4 August 2011
I was lucky enough to be invited to do a performance as part of the 4 August edition of Open Circuit, a series of monthly concerts at the Lanternhouse in Ulverston. I was sharing the bill with Gagarin, Noise Research and Deep Clutter, a collaboration between the event's organiser Shaun Blezard and vocalists Steve Lewis and Mary Oliver. I did a development of the Bracknell piece (see below). I'm told a recording is on its way and I will put some up here when I have it.
Andi Chapple and Musicians, UCLAN, Preston, May 2011
go to the Andi Chapple and Musicians page for recordings from this project.
South Hill Park, 4 February 2011
I was invited to take part in a concert at South Hill Park in Bracknell, Berkshire, to celebrate the opening there of Simon Whetham's installation Active Crossover. the idea was that one performer would start; after about 15 minutes, a second performer would join in; and a few minutes after that, the first performer would drop out and the second performer would continue their set. I played with double bass player Dominic Lash and I played first. Simon himself played with Colin Potter.
excerpt 1 (192Kbps MP3 file, 3', 4MB)
the first excerpt is from early in the performance. you can hear the second half of a vocal piece using weather records from a weather station north of Kendal for May 2008; wind speed is mapped to vocal intensity, wind direction is mapped to tone colour (or vowel - the region of the mouth whose resonance is used to filter the sound), and temperature is mapped to amount of computer processing. fading up through the vocal piece is a time-lapse study based on recordings from Nursery Wood, Sedbergh, at the beginning of September 2010 - about four days' worth edited down to eight minutes.
excerpt 2 (192Kbps MP3 file, 5', 6.6MB)
the second excerpt is from the main segment of the performance. I was working with recordings made under a disused (but still very echoy) railway bridge on Jordan Lane, Middleton, near Sedbergh, looping them in real time, controlling as much as I could with a set of MIDI controller foot pedals made out of CD-Rs and piezoelectric pickups.
Andi Chapple and Musicians, June 2010
go to the Andi Chapple and Musicians page for an edited version of a recording of this gig.
Three Spring Performances, 2009
go to the Andi Chapple and Musicians page for sound and video from these gigs.
In The Sparkly Dark, 2008
below are links to MP3 format sound files to do with the In The Sparkly Dark performance:
ITSD_19Dec08_Prelude.mp3 (3', 4MB, 192 Kbps) - some tinkly zooming-through-the-planets electronics and the opening words of Helen Bromley's piece. electronics by me, words by Helen Leslie Bromley, voices by Emma Watton, Nela Geuer, Jan Harrison and Mark Browne. coughing by pretty much everyone in the audience.
ITSD_19Dec08_StableDoorInDulciJubilo.mp3 (8', 11MB, 192 Kbps) - the Three Wise Persons make it to the stable ... some angelic electronics, the speech choir in full flow. followed by the lovely old carol 'In Dulci Jubilo'. electronics by me, words by Helen Leslie Bromley, voices by Emma Watton, Nela Geuer, Jan Harrison, Mark Browne and me, accordion by Phil Bull, piano and darbuka by Colin Blakey.
Installations
A Month of Sundays, 2010
you can hear a short, binaural recording of the sound from this installation on the A Month of Sundays page.
'Each Pebble Its Part', 2008
below are links to MP3 format sound files to do with the 'Each Pebble Its Part' installation:
EPIP_Sedbergh_excerpt.mp3 - a short (2'08", 3MB) installation recording of 'Each Pebble Its Part' at Ephemeral House in Sedbergh, 22 June 2008.
EPIP_Brighton_excerpt.mp3 - a short (2'24", 3.4MB) installation recording of 'Each Pebble Its Part' at The Basement in Brighton, 5 July 2008.
EPIP_Brighton.mp3 - the full-length (13'45", 19MB) installation recording of 'Each Pebble Its Part' at The Basement in Brighton, 5 July 2008. as well as the other sound pieces installed in the space - Quartet Electronische's 'Quartet Operation', Tim Manning's 'Forever Falling' and Mark Benton's 'Disposium' - you can hear a sound check for Sarah Angliss' 'Machines Not Angels' performance, with Sarah's computer-controlled handbells and a cellist and dulcimer player whose names I don't know.
EPIP_studio.mp3 - a 10-minute, 14MB studio version of a walk down the stones.
these recordings are best listened to on reasonable speakers or headphones to get the detail. the studio version, especially, has a lot of low-end stuff going on.
Time and motion studies
Long Rigg Beck motion studies
working on the 'Each Pebble Its Part' sounds in 2008 made me think about trying to edit together short samples of sounds recorded along the course of a stream to give an idea of it through quick, smooth changes - a bit like the old time-lapse film of the London to Brighton train journey (posted on YouTube here) - and these are some pieces I have made from recordings along Long Rigg Beck, the stream in a long, hidden valley up in the Howgill Fells behind Sedbergh. I'm still playing with sample lengths and edit points to get the best balance between smoothness, velocity and hearing the character of each sample.
downstream.mp3 (51", 2MB, 320 Kbps)
upstream.mp3 (1', 2.4MB, 320 Kbps)
downstream fast.mp3 (20", 800KB, 320 Kbps)
upstream fast.mp3 (20", 800KB, 320 Kbps)
Time-lapse studies
I've been working for a while on compressing time in field recordings as well as motion. in the first of the South Hill Park excerpts linked to above, you can hear a bit of work on wind in trees; below is a link to 'Rush Hour', a piece that compresses four and a half hours of early morning traffic on the main road into and out of Sedbergh into five and a half minutes. I didn't want to use digital time compression for this; I have ended up cutting the recording up into ten-minute chunks, overlapping them, then cutting the result into chunks again and overlapping them.
AndiChapple'RushHour'(2011)_192KbpsCBR.mp3 (5', 8MB, 192 Kbps)