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Author Archives: Steve Bowbrick
Bells and projectors
These two recordings made for a lovely ride home from work today. Both are from Touch Radio, which is the podcast of unorthodox record label Touch, founded thirty years ago by Cabaret Voltaire member and elite sound recordist Chris Watson … Continue reading
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Tagged audio, bell, church bells, cinema, film projector, history, peal, Touch, Walthamstow
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Human mic
If the Occupy movement has a sound it’s the mic check – the sound of a crowd arriving at a consensus without the aid of amplification. Invented specifically to circumvent the prohibition of megaphones and PAs in the public spaces … Continue reading
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Tagged human mic, meeting, mic check, Occupy, OWS, protest, Wall Street
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London Sound Survey
Something extraordinary going on here. IM Rawes is building a finely-textured archive of London sounds, published under posterity-friendly licences and with a range of clever ways to access the audio (maps, historic and current, being the main way in). I’m … Continue reading
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Tagged ambient, archive, geolocation, history, London, record, sound, time
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The instruments of Harry Partch
This one fell from the sky – or at least from WFMU’s Twitter feed. The whole of the third LP from Partch’s 1969 triple album release of Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion A marvellous disquisition … Continue reading
The sound of a Warcraft dungeon
Kindly recorded for me (in binaural ‘headphone mode’) by my thirteen year-old son Oliver. I’ve always been intrigued by the sound of the great battles and quests unfolding on the screen when he’s playing World of Warcraft. So he’s recorded … Continue reading
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Tagged audio, boss, dungeon, game, instance, mob, sound, World of Warcraft
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Malaysia, 1903
A haunting recording from 1903. The artist is a Malaysian musician called Qasim, the piece is called ‘Lagu Nuri Terbang Malam’. It was among the first recordings made in Asia by recording industry legend Fred Gaisberg. It’s collected here, in … Continue reading
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Tagged 78rpm, Excavated Shellac, folklore, Fred Gaisberg, Free Music Archive, Malaysia, MP3, music, recording
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James Joyce reading from Finnegans Wake
From Ubuweb, of course. Joyce is reading – in a lovely, comical brogue – a passage about Anna Livia Plurabelle. I might tell you something about ALP but that would be to give you the impression that I have read … Continue reading
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Tagged Anna Livia Plurabelle, author, Finnegans Wake, James Joyce, Paris, Sylvia beach
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Circe equestre, Paris
This is gorgeous. A field recording of a very good nine-piece Romanian gypsy band at a Parisian circus, made in 2009 and published under a Creative Commons licence by notthisbody at the excellent Freesound.org. Download the MP3 from Freesound.org.
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Tagged band, CC, circus, Creative Commons, France, Paris, Romania
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Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
What were the towering achievements of twentieth century American culture? Since you’re asking, I’ll make a case for the moon landings (featured here the other day) and for Rhapsody in Blue. This is the original, acoustic recording from 1924, the … Continue reading
Sound from another world
Yesterday’s NASA audio reminded me of something mindblowing from a few years ago. This is the actual sound (several recordings spliced together in fact) of the Huygens probe dropping through the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005. At the … Continue reading
