I was delighted to have work recently broadcast in two episodes of Short Cuts on BBC Radio 4.
You can listen to the two episodes below, both pieces are very different - one features whale song crafted from porn, the other explores the dreams of British astronaut Helen Sharman!
Porn Whales featured in Short Cuts episode “Remix”
The Astronaut’s Dream with Helen Sharman featured in Short cuts episode “Dreaming“
Over the last year I've been producing a radio documentary for the BBC World Service, it's called "Leaving the Fold" and it airs today! It explores the stories of three people who have decided to walk away from their faith and the difficulties they faced in doing so.
You can stream it and download it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p046hfzb
What does it take for someone to turn their back on their religious upbringing? What effect does that decision ultimately have on them and those around them? We explore the personal journeys of three people who walked away from their faiths and redefined their morality in a world without God.
An ex-Muslim, ex-Hindu, and an ex-born-again-Christian, each recount what their lives were like growing up in devout religious families and what spurred them on to renounce their faith. The programme traces the moments that defined their journeys.
What did removing the hijab in public for the first time represent for the ex-Muslim? How did a religiously motivated bomb attack in India affect the ex-Hindu’s understanding of his faith? How did the ex-born-again-Christian learn to live in a world without morals and rules defined by God?
A sonic impression of a panic attack
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Let your imagination loose on an in-the-dark journey with the work of theatre maker Jan van den Berg, lighting designer; Jennifer Tipton, physicist; John Pendry, sound poet; Jaap Blonk; and many more.
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Last year, as part of an AHRC funded project, I was commissioned to make a short experimental audio documentary on the subject of silence. I was given freedom as to how I explored this subject and so I set out to capture the thoughts of those who worked with sound and in silent spaces.
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The result, unsurprisingly, was that silence meant lots of different things to different people and so thematically it was very noisy! This relationship between noise and silence was one I was keen to explore through the production and so the piece is filled with hiss, distortion and feedback in an attempt to echo the noisy subject matter. This was explored further through the use of interviews but also with extracts of the poem 'Describing Silence' which are intercut throughout. This piece written by James Wilkes was a response to his time spent in total silence and explores some of the self generated noise born out of silence.
Creating a sense of place through sound - a collection of audio shorts for the D&AD Inspired by Audio website.
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In a week’s time In The Dark will be hosting a special listening event at the Wellcome Collection, as part of the larger Voice event. We will be curating an evening of listening that taps into our complex relationship with the voice, featuring a rich chorus of vocalisations, speech and other oral oddities.
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I've recently started producing podcasts for a new non-profit organisation called Pod Academy - they release weekly podcasts on academia and research, covering everything from the arts and culture to science and the environment. There's a really nice range of subjects covered by the podcasts and their library is growing on a weekly basis. You can browse what they have to offer here.
My latest offering takes a trip around the morgue of the Sunderland Royal Infirmary, with pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton as a guide. The piece provides a glimpse into mortuary life, from working with the dead on a daily basis, to dealing with cross dressing 'auto-erotic asphyxiation' fatalities.
You can listen to the piece over at the Pod Academy website here. Or download it here. The piece takes material recorded for my larger documentary piece 'The D-Word'.
If you want to stay up to date with the podcasts you can subscribe to their podcast feed via iTunes.
http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/porn-whales
The idea for this piece fell out of a session playing around with audio samples taken from various pornography films, in a bid to produce something for an In the Dark listening event. After a while of manipulating and stretching out these smutty samples I was struck by how much the moans and groans came to resemble the calls of whales.
After a bit of whale sound research I worked to manipulate these sounds until they modelled the range of sounds associated with whales. From the high-pitched clicks, squeaks and squeals to the lower frequency rumbles. The sounds become slightly more unsettling when processed in this way (although out of context they didn't originally sound that nice to begin with), removing the visual element with which these sounds were originally presented with, definitely made them more sinister. The high-pitched screams are particularly unsettling on their own, baring very little resemblance to the original sample.
However for the event this piece was to be presented at we were keen to finish with something fairly light hearted and I thought it would be much more fun to experiment and explore the concept of 'porn whales' than turn this into something dark and foreboding - there was plenty of that featured at the event anyway.
The sounds of the sea were added to provide a little context (recorded in Brighton on a zoom H4n) and the gentle, soothing music came from Kevin Macleod.
The piece was featured and played as part of the In the Dark 'One Night Stand' listening event at the Clachan Pub, London 14/05/12.
An added bonus - I thought I'd also share with you one of Isabella Rosseliini's great Green Porno films - 'Whale Sex' :
http://youtu.be/A-zJ1hGm-F8
The latest In The Dark listening event: 'One Night Stand' took an unusual step into the murky world of erotica, featuring pieces exploring sex across the animal kingdom; from humans, to snails, to fish and finally to whales. The night proved to be so popular that we had to put on a second sitting, suggesting that sex really does sell, even when it comes to curated listening events.
Sofia Saldanha and I mixed and compiled the audio for the night, including the production of new material to interweave and transition between pieces. Audio featured included a beautiful and emotionally charged interview from the Dialogue Project, a rather unsettling but humorous piece from Canadian radio show Audio Smut (about masterbating in public places) and and a personal favourite from Danish producer Pejk Malinovski whose piece made reference to the artist Matisse by exploring the reproductive behaviours of snails (can be heard here).
We were really keen to move past a linear playlist which simply presented the pieces rigidly, separated by silence. Instead we experimented in blending all the pieces together into a seamless mix. In many cases we produced short interludes and transitions to help take the listener smoothly from one piece to the next and to keep them immersed within the general narrative of the night.
Finishing off the event was 'Porn Whales' - an audio short I'd produced, manipulating the sounds of pornography to resemble the calls of whales (below).
Porn Whales
http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/porn-whales
After a bit of whale sound research I worked to manipulate these sounds until they modelled the range of sounds associated with whales. From the high-pitched clicks, squeaks and squeals to the lower frequency rumbles. The sounds of the sea were added to provide a little context (recorded in Brighton on a zoom H4n) and the gentle, soothing music came from Kevin Macleod.
Following the recent In The Dark: Cityscapes event I was interviewed for the Monocle 24 radio show 'The Urbanist' - we talked about some of the pieces played, discuss the power of audio and explore the nature of urban soundscapes. You can have a listen below, although I admit, I much prefer being on the other side of the microphone.
Listen here: [audio http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13042873/Urbanist%20ITD%20interview.mp3]
The Dustbin Man Cometh was also featured featured on NTS radio by Graham Dunning on his show 'Fractal Meat on a Spongy Bone' - the show's a nice listen for anyone interested in avant garde audio, featuring a jagged mix of experimental music, sound art and sonic experimentation. There's a blog associated with the show here and you can catch the show every second Friday between 8-10am on NTS Radio. Recommended listening.
You can listen to the show below:
http://soundcloud.com/n_u_t_s/fractal-meat-on-a-spongy-6
On Wednesday night I curated a listening event for In The Dark, held within the intimate confines of the Wapping Project's Bookshop, which just happens to be in a Glasshouse. If you've never been to an In The Dark event before, think of it as a film screening, but for radio, sound and audio stories.
The pieces chosen were all tied to the theme of 'Cityscapes', tapping into the many stories, textures and soundscapes that resonate from urban environments. The selection spanned a range of styles and formats, from more conventional narrative / documentary pieces to the more abstract, capturing the essence of urban decay through sound.
The features were also blended together with a collection of field recordings which I'd taken from around London, as well as those taken elsewhere, including a Parisian recording form Soundlandscapes blog.
Some notes on a few of the pieces featured:
Out of the Blocks
Included on the playlist was a 7 minute edit of 'Out of the Blocks', as recently featured on the Third Coast International site. Produced through a collaboration between radio producer Aaron Henkin and electronic / Hip-hop producer Wendel Patrick, the piece presents a sound rich documentary profiling of an entire city block in Baltimore, 'documenting the stories, voices, and people who populate the 3300 block of Greenmount Ave.'. What makes this piece stand out is in its interesting use of music, which was scored exclusively by Patrick adding greater texture to the voices and the stories they tell. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj0JQF63lZQ]
You can listen to the short edit on the Third Coast site where there's also a nice interview with the pair. To listen to the original full hour edit of the documentary go on over to Wendel Patrick's site.
Gateshead Multistory Car Park
Towards the end of the night we delved into the darker side of urban decay, with an excerpt from the Langham Research Centre's menacing sound profile of the Gateshead Multi-story Carpark, originally produced for Radio 3's Between the Ears.
The piece was recorded entirely on location and laid down on reel-to-reel tape, where it was manipulated further, slowed down and looped. Everything heard in this feature was derived from sounds captured within the Carpark and you can really get a sense of the menacing and repressive tone that this concrete behemoth exuded:
http://soundcloud.com/langham-research-centre/gateshead-multistorey-carpark
The Dustbin Man Cometh
One of the regular noises I come across living in a city, is the early morning mechanical chaos of the dustbin collection. To finish of the night, I played a piece which I'd produced specially for the event - a heavily processed sound piece created from the single recording of a dustbin truck collection.
If you have ever been woken up in the early hours by this sort of noise, I'm sure you're aware of the complex mechanical racket that they make. It's a great collection of sounds - clangs, squeaks and crashes - I really wanted to capture and then pull out elements of this noise, turning them into an evolving, glitchy cascade of sound that would fill the listening space it was to be presented in. Anyway, have a listen below:
http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/the-dustbin-man-cometh
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The next In The Dark event will be held on the 4th April, aboard the Lightship95 with guest curator Martin Johnson
Before Christmas I started working on an ambitious new project for Unreal City Audio who are producing multi-part audio tours exploring offbeat strands of London history. I am currently helping to produce part of their Coffeehouse series, which will eventually end up as an interactive iPhone App.
The tours are being developed as a series of 'legs' with an emphasis on narrative and rich sound design, so are suitable for listening both on location or elsewhere.
The Coffeehouse tour currently in development guides the listener along a mysterious and often dark path of London history, tracing the rise of coffee into the forefront of mainstream culture. The main challenge (and joy) of this project is in recreating an authentic and immersive sound which will pull the listener into the rich narrative written by historian, coffee expert and project co-founder Dr Matt Green.
The tours aims to provide what Matt describes as a 'cathartic voyage of discovery' into an alternate London history, not often visited by mainstream guides or tours. You can hear more about these tours, including how each leg is developed and produced in an interview I recorded with Matt: [audio "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13042873/Matt%20Green%20Interview%20Piece.mp3"]
You can listen to a brief extract from one of the pieces I've been producing which takes place in George Yard (see map below) - in it we hear the flames of the great fire beginning to engulf the streets of London. Suspicion has fallen upon Turkish coffee vendor Pasqua Roseé whose mysterious new drink has been generating a lot of unease with many of the locals (and it appears they're out to get him!) but not everything is as it seems...
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[googlemaps http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=george+yard+london&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=George+Yard,+London+EC3V+9DH,+United+Kingdom&gl=uk&t=h&layer=c&cbll=51.512614,-0.085837&panoid=57aJzD6wKh2ZrrbllJFKvw&cbp=13,36.59,,0,0.62&source=embed&ll=51.508903,-0.085874&spn=0.012821,0.036478&z=14&output=svembed&w=425&h=240]
In addition to the audio tours, Matt has also adapted the material into a series of 'live' walking tours, which he presents accompanied by actors and musicians, and are already being met with critical acclaim. He will be giving tours throughout March and April, to find out more and book a place drop by his website here.
You can also keep up to date with Unreal City Audio via their twitter (from which they also tweet unusual facts about London history).
Why is death such a difficult subject to talk about? From hospital mortuary to the grave, The D-Word explores our complex relationship with death through the perspective of those who deal with it on a daily basis.
Recently featured on Transom.org, The D-Word is an audio documentary I produced last summer on the subject of death. I'd urge you to visit Transom and explore their excellent site, but you can also listen to or download my piece below:
[audio "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13042873/The%20D%20Word.mp3"]Download (MP3) (right click)
The documentary was made in part for my MSc in Science Media Production and explores our relationship with death through the perspective of those who deal with it on a daily basis.
The piece experiments with a braided narrative weaving between interview and actuality recordings, taking the listener into a hospital mortuary, inside funeral homes and across a church yard to explore the concept of death from a number of personal perspectives.
This documentary is also a response to my own experience in dealing with the death of a close friend and you can read more about this in my article over at Transom.org.
In addition to this piece, I also produced two further shorts from the material recored for this documentary. These short audio vignettes experiment with form and sound to explore some of the themes touched upon by pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton.
http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/adam-as-machine
http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/winters-rest
This is a short audio piece which was originally created for the In The Dark Christmas party - however it didn't quite fit the bill in the end, being as it is, devoid of any Christmas cheer. Anyway, I thought I'd better not let it go to waste and instead make it available on here - I suppose this is the obligatory Christmas themed post.
It's another short piece (see Adam as machine) which has fallen out of The D-Word, a documentary I produced over the summer which will be appearing on Transom.org early in the new year. This piece features pathologist, Dr Stuart Hamilton and was recorded in the mortuary at the Sunderland Royal Infirmary back in July. The material I recorded with Stuart at the mortuary only forms a small part of the overall documentary, yet I think it's interesting enough to justify an entire piece on it's own, maybe I'll get around to it one day.
Dr Hamilton explained to me how winter was a particularly busy period for the mortuary staff, with mortality rates increasing in the elderly over the colder months of the year. Another interesting point was that they tended to receive an increase in the number of decomposed bodies at Christmas, but I'll let you listen to the piece to find out why...
http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/winters-rest
I'm not going to go into a massive rant on how important it is to make an effort to spend time with family, because I'm particularly guilty of not doing so. It just seems that the mortuary staff gain a depressing insight into the mistakes we make and how we choose to lead our lives.
An experimental sound piece which takes recordings made during a vist to Bury St Edmunds and weaves them into a surreal narrative, morphing between lakeside walks, market criers, street performers and birdsong. Recordings made using a Zoom H4n, edited and assembled on Ableton Live.
Headphones recommended.
[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/27315140"]
On Friday I attended the latest In The Dark listening event which was held at the Folly for a Flyover venue (a peculiar pop-up cinema / art space) in Hackney, East London. What was particularly exciting about this event was that I was having one of my very own pieces exhibited / played and it was very humbling to hear my work alongside those from well established and respected radio producers!
If you've never heard of In The Dark, it's a fantastic organisation which champions and commissions experimental radio pieces. They basically encourage producers to play around with the radio format to create weird, yet wonderfully original audio pieces. If you're a fan of WNYCs RadioLab then this is definitely something for you.
The organisation regularly holds 'listening events' across London, bringing together a community of producers and listeners to hear a selection of audio shorts, curated by founder Nina Garthwaite. Although sitting 'in the dark' with a bunch of people, listening to radio may sound like an unusual way to spend the evening, it really is a great experience and I must say something very unique! Each of the pieces played are stylistically distinct and certainly always thought provoking, so you can never be sure what you might end up listening to.
On Friday, the night was arranged into three parts:
My piece, entitled 'Adam as machine' (you can read more about it here), fell into the 'Structures' category and followed Leo Hornak's 'All You Can Hear is Breathing' - which explores the insane Empire State Building 'Run-Up' race. Favorites of the night included a piece by Sarah Cuddon called 'The Books' (an extended edit currently available on iPlayer) and the latest Hackney Podcast entitled 'Wild Hackney', produced by Francesca Panetta and Russel Finch (listen to it here).
I've re-posted my piece below if you want to have a listen...
[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/19409214"]
I'm currently in the midst of producing a 30 minute radio piece on the subject of death. To be more specific, I'm exploring contemporary attitudes towards death and doing so through the perspective of those who deal with death on a daily basis.
Part of my project took me to the basement of the Royal Sunderland Hospital where I spent the day exploring it's mortuary with pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton. Recently, as I was listening back to his interview I begun to find myself fixated on a particular section, in which he discusses the way in which he views the human body. He describes his view of life as being very 'mechanistic' and as I listened to him talk about the body as 'pumps' and 'shunts' I was inspired to compose a short piece from his words.
As a biologist myself, I have always considered the human body to represent a beautiful feat of natural engineering. From the minute intricacies of the inner ear to the extent of the circulatory system, pulsating to the rhythm of a beating heart - the human body is living machine. Our consciousness and everything that makes us, 'us' is a product of this machinery and when the machine stops - so do we.
The title of this piece toys with the idea of Adam and Eve and how this throws up a very different view of the human body. However which ever view you take, both are unified in the fact that they find certain beauty in the human form.
[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/19409214"]
Soundcloud's audio compression has reduced the quality of the piece somewhat so please get in touch if you'd like a copy of the original file.
I'm posting two little audio pieces to mark the end of NASAs space shuttle program which will (with any luck) enter its final mission today with the launch of Atlantis (STS-135) in a few hours.
The first was produced for the latest Imperial College I,Science podcast and features science writer and producer Piers Bizony speaking on the history of the space shuttle program at a Super/Collider event in May.
[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18609588"]
The Second is a short piece extracted from the first, imagining what it might sound like to be inside the shuttle during take-off. The radio chatter you hear comes from Columbia (STS-1), the very first shuttle launch which blasted off over 30 years ago on 12th April 1981. The eventual winding down towards the end symbolises the ending of the project's 30 year run.
[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18609682"]
The BBC has produced an excellent interactive history of the space shuttle program here and a friend from my course has also written an excellent article on the future of manned spaced flight here
We had a great time playing our hand picked sounds of science at Dazed Live on Saturday - thanks to Chris from Super/Collider for inviting us on!
The show has now been uploaded to Mixcloud so give it a listen! - also on the show is music from Bright Star Catalogue and interviews with the likes of Jay Cousins (buy this satellite) and Magnus Larsson !
Check it out at this link: http://www.mixcloud.com/dazed/dazed-live-super-collider/
For some reason the embedded player below refuses to work.