An audio time-travelogue, based on found reel-to-reel tapes of pre-recorded slideshow commentaries from the 60s and 70s, collected by Mark Vernon over the past twenty years.
"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.
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.
A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he co-runs and curates Glasgow's art radio station, Radiophrenia. He was a founding member of Glasgow's Radio Tuesday collective and went on to set up several other RSL art radio projects in the UK including Hair Waves, Efford FM and Nowhere Island Radio. He is an award winning radio producer who has created programmes for stations including Resonance FM, VPRO, Sound Art Radio, Radio Revolten, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio Cona, Radio Picnic, Ears Have Ears, Kunstradio, Wavefarm, RADIA, EBU and the BBC. Since 2011 he has co-run Lights Out Listening Group—a bi-monthly listening event focused on creative uses of sound and radio that takes place in complete darkness. His solo and collaborative music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Glistening Examples,
Staalplaat, Flaming Pines, Ultra Eczema, Entr'acte, 3Leaves, Misanthropic Agenda, Canti Magnetici, Staubgold,
Gagarin Records,
Discrepant, Granny, Calling Cards Publishing, Psyché Tropes,
Persistence of Sound,
Sonoris, as well as a series of small CDR and LP editions on his own meagre resource imprint.
