Light Folds

Facture 008

Release Date | Septembr 30th 2013

Release contents :

Double Vinyl, double cd, audio playing DVD, Print Set, Inserts and Poster

The audio process.

Light Folds by The Seaman and The Tattered Sail is a collaboration between Craig Tattersall (The Boats, The Remote Viewer, The Humble Bee, Cotton goods, Theodore and Hamblin, The Famous Boyfriend, etc.etc. and artist/designer) and Bill Seaman (SEA, Attsea, Otic.Info.Set, sp.op.cit, Spilly and the Drops, etc. and media artist exploring linear and interactive works). The work took place via the internet, sending differing files back and forth using Drop Box, wetransfer.com, and vast quantities of email. After about 2 years Tattersall and Seaman met face to face!

It started with a simple back and forth set of responses to a few audio files, building up loops and tracks. Over time it built up to over seven hours of music. We initially made a double CD of works but we kept abstracting and remixing and colliding things. Tattersall brought his distinct form of “dusting” which explored unique forms of noise, tape ambience, tape degradation, etc. Seaman often explored abstraction using Ableton Live, especially in terms of time / pitch manipulation, and exploring the combination of a multitude of Ableton plug-ins. Huge amounts of data were sent back and forth! Occasionally we went a bit mad with naming and keeping track of things… Usually a number of mixes for each initial work emerged out of the process. Sometimes the abstractions went quite far away from the original tracks. The double album on Vinyl came late in the game where a series of shorter versions and new abstractions were defined.

Tattersall played Guitar, piano, dusted loops, analogue loops, digital loops, drum machine, analogue synth, synth bass, field recordings, abstractions, fragment constructions and reconstructions, abstractions of Seaman (etc.), analogue spatial recordings, artificial wind, crackles (record surface noise).

Seaman was working primarily with Ableton Live and contributed Piano, vocal, text, fragment constructions and reconstructions, time abstractions, quartet samples, trumpet samples, clarinet samples, drum machine abstractions, drum machine constructions (samples), digital distortions, bit reductions, synth abstractions, abstractions of Tattersall (etc.), digital loops, radical pitch shifts, noise enhancements, historical samples, crackles – record surface noise (from Tattersall), artificial crackles.

We worked with some excellent musicians in the construction of the samples…

Trumpet (sample recordings) – Robert Ellis-Geiger; Ciompi Quartet (sample recordings) – Eric Pritchard (violin), Hsiao-mei Ku (violin), Jonathan Bagg (violin and viola), Fred Raimi (cello); Clarinet drones (sample recordings) — David Beaudry; in Ableton Live (construction space), and Seaman used a Roland Edirol R-09HR Ver.3.0 for instrument and voice recordings.

The musical influences run the gamut from ambient, industrial, glitch, dance, pop, jazz, classical, experimental, noise art, etc. Seaman has called this alt.genre in the past… although it really defies a single musical label.

The working process was quite exciting to hear what each had done with the tracks as an ongoing process… The project is incredibly rich in its subtle exploration of psychoacoustic spaces and layerings, and it is vast… The works form a series of plateau-like spaces where time is explored and erased, and an atmosphere for reflection and association is presented. Duration was not worried about and many of the works are quite long. The entire project has been incredibly exciting and rewarding in that we each seemed to pull the best out of the other!

It is also worth noting that as an aside to creating within this album, there was a huge element of learning within the album.

Working with a new creative partner always begins with finding a commonality in working practices, then from this you can bring your individual approaches to working practices, it is in the dialogue whilst working through these passages that you learn from each other.

1CD.mp3

Cd Version

1) Her Whispers Fall Silent | 10min 48sec

3CD.mp3

Cd Version

3) The Lighthouse of Grey Sound | 12min 15sec


The artwork process.

Like most work undertaken there is a underlying aesthetic language that has been built up over years of arts practice, whether this be audio or visual production.

An aesthetic language seems to span audio and visual works that is to say that you use a language and approach to creation in the same way whether it be audio or visual work, so it seems obvious that visual artwork that is in creation at any given time will in some ways mirror audio creation at the same time.

So as we where in the thick of creating the audio I had started making some experimental pin hole lumen prints (a photographic technique where you work with photographic paper within direct sunlight).

These were simple images of dots created with holes in little metal boxes. They were interested in capturing light and time rather than a conventional image. So the images were created using one (pin) hole exposed for one hour, two (pin) holes for two hours and so on up to 12 holes/12 hours.

I was sharing these with Bill and as well as Bill liking the work/process it became apparent that they seemed to share an aesthetic with the audio we were working, looking at light, time, space.

So in conversation with Bill I started to take the photographs into digital forms, exploring how the ‘dust’ of the analogue process could be extrapolated through digital forms, and then of course taken back into the darkroom and analogue processes, exactly how we were working in the audio work.

From there, and through extensive email conversations the artwork developed into the body of work that comes with the release.

Like the artwork the titles also reflect the abstraction process. Needless to say - “Light Folds” can be understood from many different perspectives.

  • Craig Tattersall
8CD.mp3

Cd Version

8) If Light Turned the Tide Breathing | 9min 32sec

10CD.mp3

Cd Version

10) Suspended Dust, Slow Movement, Light’s End | 13min 34sec


The Dvd Process.

Sometime during the recording process we realised that there was going to be a large amount of audio, several versions, or abstractions of each track were forming, and possibly whole different versions of the album. (This turned out to be 5 full album versions)

Our initial idea was that we wished to make all of this available with the release.

A mixture of, I guess really liking all the versions and also some vague notion that we were sharing the creative/developing process with the audience.

Although we could have just made these tracks available in a digital form with the release we are both heavily interested in physical things but found that we had major limitations with Vinyl and Cd in housing what turned out to be over 9 hours of audio.

A Dvd seemed the obvious way to do this in a physical form, the capacity allowing us to include so much more material than a standard Cd.

So we started to programme a Dvd that would play all the audio, and although there are no actual films/videos on the Dvd we used still imagery from our image bank to accompany each track, this helped us group things into the distinct albums that were slowly forming within the recording process.

It was at this point that we started to think about what extra a Dvd could offer us in terms of programming.

We are both very interested in random processes and chance operations, and a Dvd would enable us to programme in random features.

So we decided that we would attempt to have the Dvd play a randomised album.

We decided that the Dvd should always play the album in a linear form, so choose track 1 first and then track 2 and 3 and so on until it had played all 12 songs.

The randomness comes by programming the Dvd to choose from a number or versions of each track, 5 in total.

So there were 5 versions of all track 1 to 12, 60 ‘songs’ in total.

I asked a friend to try to draw up a calculation that would work out how many versions of the album there is if the Dvd played all the possible version using the 60 songs.

It turns out to be this number,

9,745,312,500,000,000

A number I don’t really understand in any real sense, but then the idea that someone could possibly listen to all permutations of the album is a pretty abstract notion itself.

After we have programmed the random playing LP we decided to also make the none random linear albums available, so that a choice could be made about which version to listen to.

So the Dvd contains full album runs of the Cd and Vinyl versions as well as three other complete albums runs marked as Abstractions ¾ and 5.

We hope that people enjoy hearing our working process as much as our journey through the sound which in many ways charts the progression of two complete musical strangers developing a shared language and aesthetic.

Print Set.

CD.

Disc 1

1) Her Whispers Fall Silent | 10min 48sec

2) A Tear In The Sails | 8min 00sec

3) The Lighthouse of Grey Sound | 12min 15sec

4) Light Against The Swells | 15min 27sec

5) In Light of the Mercurial | 11min 08sec

6) The Fallen Light | 19min 54sec

Disc 2

7) A Body of 7 Holes | 15min 40sec

8) If Light Turned the Tide Breathing | 9min 32sec

9) Matter and Light | 9min 32sec

10) Suspended Dust, Slow Movement, Light’s End | 13min 34sec

11) The Tender of Emotion | 10min 56sec

12) Light Folds | 18min 27sec


4V.mp3

Vinyl Version

8) If Light Was Breathing on the Turn of the Tide | 9min 51sec

Vinyl.

Side 1

1) Her Whispers | 7min 42sec

2) A Void of Light | 8min 13sec

3) Dust and Grey Sound | 5min 24sec


Side 2

4) Against the Swells | 5min 56sec

5) The Luminous Mercurial | 6min 16sec

6) Dusk | 6min 21sec


Side 3

7) 7 Holes | 4min 56sec

8) If Light Was Breathing on the Turn of the Tide | 9min 51sec

9) ShiftLightMatter | 6min 17sec


Side 4

10) Light’s End | 5min 31sec

11) Tender To The Touch | 6min 56sec

12) Minute Folds | 8min 08sec


Abstraction 3.

1) Whispers Across the Silent Dusk | 11min 42sec

2) A Tear in the Sea | 14min 24sec

3) In a Fragmented Light | 10min 24sec

4) Light Folds Across the Swells | 17min 19sec

5) Luminous Hands | 9min 25sec

6) Repetition of a Gesture | 10min 08sec

7) Light Falls / 7 Holes | 11min 22sec

8) The Final Light | 6min 24sec

9) Shifting Light / Waves of Matter | 6min 32sec

10) Light Cuts / Key Motions | 9min 20sec

11) Of Emotion | 10min 09sec

12) Light Folds [Syn] | 5min 12sec


Abstraction 4.

1) Her Whispers Are Like The Silent Dusk | 8min 36sec

2) A Tear In the Sky | 7min 51sec

3) The Lighthouse of Grey Dust (for MD) | 10min 28sec

4) Against a Swell of Emotion | 9min 04sec

5) In Light of the Mercurial / Cage (abbrev) / Life Ends | 6min 14sec

6) A Film From a Quiet Distance | 10min 08sec

7) Precede Dust (A Sound Distance) | 13min 28sec

8) If Light Turned the Tide Breathing In Dust and Grey Sound | 14min 13sec

9) If Light Was Breathing | 9min 44sec

10) Details and Folds | 9min 20sec

11) A Tender Motion | 10min 22sec

12) Skin / Light Folds / Confused Sex Machine | 7min 22sec


Abstraction 5.

1) Whispers Silence Her | 13min 52sec

2) At Its Sinking | 15min 42sec

3) (Re) Folded Light | 13min 12sec

4) Dust Against The Swells | 8min 03sec

5) This Emergent Light and The Random Walk | 6min 22sec

6) A Mix of Light Pulses (Daylight to Dusk) | 8min 24sec

7) The Folded Map of Light | 9min 00sec

8) If Light Whispers Grey Sound | 15min 12sec

9) ShiftLight Armatures | 12min 00sec

10) Light Ends and Begins Again Elsewhere | 10min 28sec

11) Attending To A Motion’s Collapse | 9min 34sec

12) One Delicately Touches The Light Folds | 7min 17sec

Video.

Booklet Spreads.