This is a live recording made at Modulate in Sheldon’s Wine Bar 20/11/19 Colwyn Bay North Wales

A few months ago a friend lent me a book he thought I might like to read. It was obviously a precious thing and the worry that it was nearly falling apart was only emphasised by the fact that its cover declared that it had once cost two shillings and sixpence.

It turned out to be written by Fred Hoyle, who some of you may have heard of as one of the ‘grand-old-men’ of UK astronomy. What fewer people are aware of is that he also used to write sci-fi, and when at his best was compared favourably to Arthur C Clarke and Isaac Asimov, although sadly not as consistent, but on the flip side Asimov and Clarke were never knighted for service to astronomy either.

So I started reading the book, in a state of terror that it might fall apart on me at any moment and constantly envisaging having to return it in several pieces. After a while the fear got the better of me and I downloaded the audio-book, listened to that, and having finished it so that I could answer the relevant questions that might be asked by the owner returned the book in one piece.

After that it fell of the radar for a while until another friend lent a Kaoss Pad. For those who don’t know what that is, it is essentially a touch pad that you can use to sample and process live sound. So there I was, sat at the living room table with the manual on my phone trying to figure this piece of kit out.

I needed some sort of audio to feed in, so, as my phone was in my hand I just used the first thing that came up and that turned out be the audio book of The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle.

It already had a slightly 1960s UK B-movie quality to it, but when you start messing around with the sound and doing basic synthesis with it, it lands emphatically in Radiophonic Workshop, Delia Derbyshire retro-sci-fi-horror territory, which was intriguing.

So what you are going to hear this evening is a half hour abridged version of the text which I edited down and built a performance around.
While editing the recording of the voice-over I also did some sound design on the computer generating a few bits that would be impractical to create in real time but would be quite possible with some patience and coding. Ironically a lot of this was done in Supercollider which is a text based programming environment, the name of which is just so close to the research done at CERN into the fundamental physics of the universe that it feels completely appropriate to work into the mix.

So I had 2 streams of sound; the voice over and the supercollider. For ease of use I recorded them to a single audio file. Normal stereo files carry 2 streams of information one for the left speaker and one for the right, and this gives spatialization between the two. In this case I recorded the voice over effectively to one speaker and the supercollider to the other, not so much left and right but synchronous A and B. This means I can isolate and play with the two things separately or in different ways while being able to simply play it out from a normal .mp3 player.

Alongside that I have also got the modular synth setup, which is smaller than quite a lot which you and this is for several reasons. The first is lack of money! Sometimes it is hard to justify spending on something when you could download a free app and get very similar sounds. The second is that I am interested in the ‘live-ness’ of performance and I can only control so many things at once. Finally, and I think this is more important is the issue of combinations.

So, we have the two audio streams; the voice-over and the supercollider, as well as the synth, going into the desk which can be routed out, either together or individually to the Kaoss Pad for sampling and transformation, which in turn goes back into the desk. All of this then goes out to the speakers and I will attempt to make this into a cohesive performance.