Facture 008

Release Date | September 30th 2013

Release contains 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.

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

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.

Video.

Booklet Spreads.