In stock
LP
Mark VERNON
“The Dramaturgy of Decay”
Vernon composes a cinema for the ears. Something uniquely textured and immediately present. I think of The Dramaturgy of Decay as a sonic equivalent to the ruined films of Bill Morrison (Decasia, 2002) or Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate, 1991). I hear the tape, the sound of the medium – and I hear it disappearing – I see the end coming. And yet the disappearance is not tragic. There is a vein of humour gently running throughout the album. For all their eeriness, Vernon’s soundscapes carry with them something comfortingly familiar – something delicate and tender like the Super 8 films of Jonas Mekas.
Vernon has long been fascinated with home-recordings and the urgent poetry of the everyday. On The Dramaturgy of Decay we hear snippets of audio letters, messages left on answering machines (“Pouring From Hollow to Empty”, “The Years Simply Dissolved”). The messages get reworked and rearranged, slowed down and taken apart. Somewhere people are forever clapping, laughing. Tentatively playing the piano. Singing uncertainly. Vernon patiently excavates the real, revealing a soundscape of the forgotten, the buried, the invisible.
Everything in The Dramaturgy of Decay speaks of death – of the irreversible passing of time, of vanishing places and voices – of that which will not return. His work captures the infinitely slow yet resolute movement of erasure, the empty place where something used to be. It also reflects the wider destruction of our environment.
Yet there is no necrophilic impulse here. As Vernon converses with the lost, the transient and the dead, it seems to me he is tirelessly extracting life from them. And he reveals not their deadness but rather the quick, living eternity of instants. The Dramaturgy of Decay is a reflection on time through sound. But, most importantly, it is extremely beautiful music. Not quite of this world and, yet, not of any other world. It is music for the here and now.
Elodie A. Roy, January 2024
22,50€
CD
Mark VERNON
“Sheet Erosion”
Audio Archaeology Series Volume 3: Brest
Sheet Erosion is the third episode in a series of works based around ideas of audio archaeology and found sounds. The setting this time is the city of Brest in France.
It is composed of field recordings made in early 2020 during the storms Ciara and Desmond plus a batch of found open-reel tape recordings dating from the 70s and 80s. The tapes include domestic home recordings but mostly document the recordist, Michel's tastes in music and radio programmes of the time. Daily life bleeds into these lo-fi recordings of radio and TV shows. Captured with a mic in front of a speaker rather than directly cabled, ambiguous activities can be heard in the background; babies crying, feedback, chairs scraping and muffled conversations.
In the composition family histories and musical tastes are transposed over a more contemporary soundscape of Brest. Over-saturated tape distorts time as well as sounds. Speeds change. Chronologies become confused. Different instances in time are blended and fused. What seeps through these chronological crevices are events and incidents unmoored from linear time taking place in a chimerical non-space.
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Mark Vernon is a Glasgow based artist who explores concepts of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and nostalgia through his sound works. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the reappropriation of found recordings. A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, answer-phone messages and other lost voices often find their way into his unorthodox soundworlds. These diverse elements are distilled into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, multi-channel diffusion, fixed media and live performances.
His solo music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Glistening Examples, Flaming Pines, Discrepant, Entr’acte, 3Leaves, Misanthropic Agenda, Canti Magnetici, Granny, Calling Cards Publishing, Psyché Tropes, Persistence of Sound and Gagarin Records, as well as a series of small CDR and LP editions on his own Meagre Resource imprint.
12,00€
Out of stock
LP
Mark VERNON
“Call Back Carousel” [!!damaged cover!!]
Pochette abimée avec au minimum 2 coins pliés (emballage médiocre du label).
Damaged cover with at least 2 corners bumped / folded (poor packaging from the label).
***** “This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved.” (Don Draper) Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind’s eye - projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listener’s mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the 60s and 70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from Vernon’s own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that he has collected over the past twenty years. Using these found slideshow commentaries as a framework, a series of musical soundscapes have been created to bring the absent images to life, activating the listeners’ imagination in the classic tradition of ‘cinema for the ears’. It’s a little like looking through a family photo album where only the hand written captions and moun1ng corners remain; the photographs themselves have all been removed. The evocative rattle and clack of the projector shuffles through different slides as the fragile voices of our tour guides accompany us on a sonic journey that fractures time - and through the cracks, the past bleeds through into our present.
Original price was: 23,00€.8,00€Current price is: 8,00€.
In stock
LP
Mark VERNON
“Time Deferred”
Mark Vernon’s solo noir album on Gagarin Records comes in an edition of 300 copies.
Cover art by Dennis “Ultra” Tyfus. Design by Meeuw. Caution: this record can cause dreamless nights.
Followers of the artist Mark Vernon will note a subdued and pensive mood on this new record. Muted and sepulchral, these tracks are in a minor key, a key which opens the door to a damp cellar of the imagination. Too-many legged spiders crawl over dusty violins. Time lurches, loops and echoes like excursions on slow motion railways in reverse. Concrète noir sombre séances for non-believers. Tauntological voices from the past provoke us. Half guessed ghosts, magnetic phantoms from funereal-to-reel tape recordings. The sibilant persistence of the deceased evokes the exhausted dread of waiting for a medical test result. Enigmatic messages thrown to the werewolves with nothing but cheap medication and some breathing exercises for support.
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Mark Vernon is a Glasgow based sound artist who works with found tapes and acousmatic presence. His oeuvre explores themes of magnetic memory, audio archaeology, voyeurism and nostalgia.
A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, answer-phone messages and other lost voices often find their way into his unorthodox soundworlds. These diverse elements are distilled into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, multi-channel diffusion, fixed media and live performances.
Together with his colleague Barry Burns he runs the renowned radio art festival Radiophrenia. Under the moniker Vernon & Burns the plunderfrolic duo's beguiling mix of Music Hall Revue and Musique Unconcrète has materialized in two critically acclaimed Gagarin albums, "The tune the old cow died of" and "The light at the end of the dial".
His and Hers and the Sun from Mark Vernon on Vimeo.
22,00€
Out of stock
LP
Mark VERNON
“An annotated phonography of chance”
‘An Annotated Phonography of Chance’ expands upon the soundtrack to an uncompleted 16mm film made in collaboration with English filmmaker Martha Jurksaitis and the Portuguese artist duo Von Calhau! The film ‘Nossos Ossos’ was shot largely on location in the Alentejo region of Portugal in 2013.
Mark Vernon is a Glasgow-based artist whose work exists on the fringes of sound art, music and broadcasting.
At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the re-appropriation of found recordings. He incorporates these diverse elements into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, fixed media and live performances.
His solo and collaborative music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Staalplaat, Ultra Eczema, Entr’acte, 3Leaves, Staubgold and Gagarin Records, as well as a series of small CDR and LP editions on his own Meagre Resource imprint.
13,00€
In stock
LP
Mark VERNON
“Lend an ear, leave a word”
Kye is proud to present “Lend an ear, leave a word” the new LP from Glasgow’s Mark Vernon. “The pieces composed for this album combine field recordings of contemporary Lisbon with found tape recordings from the past; reel-to-reel tapes, micro-cassettes and Dictaphones collected from the Feira de Ladra market, a popular and lively flea market in the Alfarma district. Each tape recording is an audio snapshot of a specific time; a family album in sound, a musical performance, a compilation of treasured music, or even just the fun of playing around with a tape recorder captured for posterity. Every thoughtless edit or push of the record button teleports us to a different time and place. The musical material extracted from the tapes is also an evocative signifier that locates it within a specific era. The interesting thing is how the tapes accumulate different strata of time even within a single side. There are consecutive chronological recordings but also sequences with unexpected breakthroughs where the user has carelessly fast-forwarded through the tape, randomly ‘dropping-in’ new recordings. These accidental edits create instantaneous new collages of sounds and voices. I have endeavoured to retain the essence of these unintentional edits and unexpected outbursts in the pieces I have assembled here. The noisy whir and clicking of the various tape mechanisms is evident on many of the found recordings. As the material is sped up and slowed down it acts as an internal clock, a continuous, steady marker of time, almost like the second hand of a timepiece. All of the pieces contained here within explore one particular environment - the city of Lisbon. Field recordings by their very nature are time-based but the introduction of found tapes into the mix expands the time-scale of these studies from just the short period spent in the city making recordings, backwards to possibly forty or more years in the past. It is a portrait in time *and* place, an archeology of sound. The result of the audio flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shores of low commerce in the flea markets of Lisbon.” (Mark Vernon) “Lend an ear, leave a word” arrives in a full color matte stock sleeve with insert and download card that features additional pieces left off the LP due to time constraints. Mastered by Jason Lescalleet in an edition of 400.
19,50€