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.
Sheet Erosion 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.
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.
