At Audiograft 2011, Paul Whitty and Stephen Cornford performed a piece at Modern Art Oxford entitled it pays my way and it corrodes my soul. This piece utilises a reel-to-reel tape-player, the expected role of which is subverted and transformed throughout the performance. The audience do not hear recorded sounds being played back through it – as is its anticipated function – instead, we hear the sounds of the machine itself as it is dismantled:
A reel-to-reel tape recorder is switched on and it’s mechanism amplified with a variety of microphones while it is taken to pieces. The sounds produced are then fed through an array of pedals: the machine’s belts, gears, switches and casing becoming an instrument subjected to a live audio autopsy. The piece was premiered at the Audiograft Festival at Modern Art Oxford in February 2011 and was subsequently performed at The Horse Hospital, London and LEAP, Berlin.
During the recent trip to Berlin to perform the work, Paul produced a Sound Diary documenting the whole journey from Oxford to LEAP and home again:
On a recent visit to Berlin to perform it pays my way and it corrodes my soul with Stephen Cornford at LEAP, I made these recordings. Whenever I could I stopped and recorded my situation from the raucous queue outside a nightclub in Oxford to the escalators at Stansted and a Mexican dinner in Berlin. The recordings were made using an Edirol R-09HR.
The resulting collection of recordings contextualises the performance within the sounds and stories of the world, blurring the distinctions between life and art, and revealing the sequences of sounds which precede and follow the designated cultural experience. As the role of the tape-player is subverted in the performance itself, so is the role of documentation in Paul Whitty’s resulting sonic work. Rather than existing merely to evidence the performance of it pays my way and it corrodes my soul at LEAP, the Berlin Sound Diary becomes a piece in its own right, extending the function of documentation in the same way that the performance extends the sonic and imaginative possibilities of an old reel-to-reel tape player.
Paul’s Berlin Sound Diary was released day by day here, throughout January 2012, as we considered the role of the Sound Diary and Sonic Documentation in the run up to Audiograft 2012 at Oxford Brookes. You can hear the whole diary below.
00.15 …at the corner of Speedwell Street and St. Aldates
00.22 …chips and beans
00.25 queueing on St. Ebbes Street
00.42 …early morning busking on George Street
00.54 …at Gloucester Green
04.17 …by the bus stop at Stansted
04.19 …Stansted escalators
08.47…inside the terminal at Berlin Schonefeld
10.46 …railway station at Berlin Schonefeld
11.35 …market in the park
12.00 …singing in the park
13.47 …looking at art
14.47 …sitting in the gallery
16.10 …eating burritos
19.26 …listening to Binatone Galaxy
19.37 …gathering in the gallery
19.54 …gallery with Binatone Galaxy in the background
Photo © Robert Henke
20.07 …the reels begin to roll
Photo © Robert Henke
20.26 …somewhere in the middle
20.46 …unplugging
23.39 …that’s going to Didcot
23.46 …catching the train at Alexanderplatz
30.37 …waiting for the train to Berlin Shonefeld
30.54 …on the train
34.48 …luggage carousel at Stansted
39.39 …walking towards the bus stop at St. Aldate’s
40.26 …back at the kinecroft in Wallingford