when showered becomes shorewed... (and more bells)

this week will be released a new soundwork - "ecstasy showered its petals with the full peal of the bells" - in the form of a 3" cd by ferns recordings. you can see the cover here. it is the first proper release i've used a photo from the collection as a cover image, which i'm quite happy about. the entire work was made using a very very special small bell as the only sound source, so the image of old ringers seemed perfect.

as you can see there is a new word we've added to the english language - "shorewed." this word is an inversion of the word "showered", and neither myself, nor seb - the label man, nor the designer who ultimately made the typo, noticed the misspell (kind of miraculous that i wasn't the one who did it as i am always inverting letters when i type!).

when seb wrote to me to apologize, i said i thought people would probably think i did it on purpose... but poor georges rodenbach, whose text the title comes from, is now rolling over in his grave wondering how ecstasy could be shorewed instead of showered... perhaps it is the kind of sound that begins in the sea and is somehow "wed" to the shore as it drifts from water to land... at least that's what i'll tell people...

for more info contact ferns recordings - fernsrec@numericable.fr

when books are like butterflies...

some images of one of the sound installations i presented in kortrijk belgium for the happy new ears festival, which opened a few days ago. the piece was installed in the old beguinage in the center of town on the second floor of the st. anne's hall, and is titled 'when books are like butterflies'. it was loosely inspired by georges rodenbach's book bruges-la-morte, not so much the story, as the atmosphere of the text. i began by notating every sound in the book as well as every color in sequence, and then used the lists to generate a sound work, a text work, and a set of images. the text and images appear in the form of dust jackets, which frame the speakers playing a 13 minute audio piece through 15 speakers (and the images are mostly from the backgrounds of some of the old music photos i typically run on airforms). rather than create an illustration of the text or a work that conceptually fits cleanly into a single resolve related to the text, the piece presents numerous paths through the same information, allowing the sounds in the book to manifest themselves in different forms (i.e. as sound, text, and image). my main interest is in creating a space of intimate wandering, where one has to get close to the books not only to read and see, but to begin to approach the activity of listening with the same intimate response to reading and looking at small things. even though they are birthed from the same source, the text sound and images do not inform each other as much as they offer different paths of experience.

when ecstasy showered its petals with the full peal of the bells

when the bells scatter
the small salty notes of the parish bells dropped on his head
the evening bells rang
the sound of the bells
the unanimous peal of the parish bells seemed to harmonize with her walk
and bells were ringing so faint, so distant
a sound of parish bells
he heard the bells more and more
the wind full of the peal of bells
through the open windows came the swelling concert of the parish bells
listened to the ringing
and also the small bells
ecstasy showered its petals with the full peal of the bells
the bell rang
in the silence, came a sound of bells
all the bells at once
to the cadence of the last bells

incredible cabinet photo of two bell lovers, gently ringing each other... the list of bells, every bell mentioned in georges rodenbach's bruges-la-morte, a dark love story shrouded in bell sounds...