Welcome to the First Blog Post of the First Day of the McFall's Electronic Project. We'll be blogging about our progress each day this week to update you on how the project develops.
Like the project itself, we are still working out the best way of working and exploring new ideas, so today we are including a short introduction to the pieces that we have been working on and some rough mixes, as well as allowing each of the participants to share their thoughts via the sub-pages on the left. So click the links in the navigation (and if you are reading this by RSS then visit the site - There Is More).
Amble Skuse is the the first of five participants taking part in the week of workshops. She submitted two pieces as part of the application process - Dóchas and Sea Longing - and we liked them both so much that we decided to try and record both.
Below you can find the scores of both works, along with our recordings and some more info about Amble.
Sea Longing hopes to communicate a sense of abandonment to the tide, of delayed communications and longing for a world which is changed beyond our recognition. The piece is in response to the identity of the sea as something which both connects and separates islanders from other habitations. Depending on the mood of the sea, the islanders must accept isolation or connection. The entrances of each player are built around a loop system, designed to evoke a sense of tide, waves building slowly upon the shore, each time, growing closer and closer to habitation, bringing the wildness of the ocean’s unpredictability to the desired controlled space of human habitat. The samples have deliberately ‘man made’ sounds such as steel and mechanics to emphasise man’s struggle to build structures and technology which withstand the sea and allow us to communicate despite it’s storms.
For reasons outside our control we have had to remove the current mix of Sea Longing. Once we have resolved the issues then we will upload a new mix of the piece.
Sea-Longing-draft-score.pdf (Adobe PDF - 97Kb)
Uaimh na h-Àrd-Eaglaise is the Gaelic for Cathedral Cave, and is based on a traditional Uist waltz, and the arrangement takes the form of heterophony – a technique found in Hebridean psalm singing. Each part builds on the basic structure without any part being allocated the full tune. Due the to layering of certain notes, a ‘tune’ begins to emerge although it is not clear which part has created this sensation. It is the combination of the voices which gives the fullness of sound and the structure of the melody. The layering and delay create a sense of return, a sense of place, and yet a slow development, each generation becoming more detailed and varied, adding to the generations which have gone before them.
dochas.mp3 (MP3 Audio - 10.53Mb)
dochas-draft-score.pdf (Adobe PDF - 73Kb)
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