australia trip - to bundeena....

australia trip - exploring around the blue mountains

australia trip - blue mountains

the first photo was taken at Wired Lab before setting off for the blue mountains

its rather nice here....next two pictures are where i'm staying in blackheath

australia trip - the weekend workshop

workshops are made by the interaction between those leading & the participants. A nice group of folks gathered at The Wired Lab this weekend & a good time was, I think, had by all. The performance event on the saturday (photos to come) was a success apart from a rather odd glitch with my laptop which meant the carefully prepared projection of photographic images stopped & instead the audience were treated to a few snaps of me in a tent eating an apple ! No doubt some thought this was the oddest 'art' they'd seen for some time !

i'm now in the blue mountains for 4 days & the thunder is ringing across the landscape....

australia trip - day three  |  day four

rain, talk to locals, beef pie from the bakery, woolworths ! (no pick n' mix though), maltesers that tasted slightly different, good steak, listening....

day four so far: up at 5am for the dawn chorus, tennis court fence, house floor vibrations & cat snoring....

australia trip - day two

morning walk in canberra

then, arrival at Wired Lab - nice folks, nice food, good wires of course, loud frogs & anticipation....

after 3 days in Norfolk tutoring on another nice Wildeye course alongside Chris Watson, followed by 3 flights over 26 hours, I've now arrived in Australia for my residency at The Wired Lab.

(qantas win a prize for playing stereolab as boarding music in Melbourne !)

flying in over mountains covered in early mists, cloud like cobwebs holding on & sliding down valleys, (listening to elizabeth fraser's new work) & contemplating the time i'll spend in australia.  Its a privilege indeed to have been invited here by Sarah & Dave at Wired Lab. I am constantly aware of how lucky I am & how much my work begins with the understanding of that.

I'm staying a night in Canberra - surely the quietest capital city in the world. I went for a short walk near my hotel & saw one person on the streets. I arrived early in the morning & intended to set out for a walk & to take some photos of some of the art deco architecture, however a quick nap somehow turned into a deeper sleep & I awoke after sunset. Perhaps tomorrow morning....

in the meantime here's some archival photos of canberra....

small creatures from sweden

back from Sweden - Stockholm then Ängskärsgården to be precise.

Spent some time at EMS in Stockholm, looking around their studios & then giving a talk - well attended by an interesting bunch of folks, some of whom then joined me, Chris Watson & Piers Warren for the Wildeye Sound Recording course at the nature reserve on the east coast, 2 hours or so from the capital.

dawn choruses (in the rain & the sun), evening choruses, exploring abandoned buildings, fence wires & telephone cables, sexton beetles, grass, unidentified insects, hydrophone discoveries, empty rooms & much more....

good folks, good food, amazing scenery, some rain & much more....

new release on Gruenrekorder

Jez riley French - 'Estonian strings'

The unpredictable music of found strings, here captured using JrF contact microphones, offers up an experience both subtle and powerful – it keeps me fascinated, as does the challenge of presenting the results in a clear, emotive and simple way – allowing the moment of discovery to remain, tempered by the slow reveal of living with this music over time.

Please note: some of the frequencies of these structures mean that listening via computer speakers is not recommended, as you simply won’t be able to hear much of the sound. Therefore, please listen via conventional audio speakers or with headphones. thanks.

The reccordings featured in this composition were made during my first trip to Estonia for a residency at Moks. For those who haven’t visited Estonia before its vast openness and freedom from sound pollution make it a fascinating country to explore. The molasses hued mirrored lakes offered up some fascinating hydrophone recordings (some of which feature on my cd ‘the bright work’). whilst the sound of trees cracking together and grain barns rattling themselves from sleep in the occasionally strong winds provided some richly charged moments of deep listening.

I found transmitter cables, long chimney support cables, disused piano wires stretched across old farm utensils, rust covered fences – each one a surprise, a discovery and a joy to listen to. Also, standing in a simple, plain field bordering a seemingly endless, straight rail track and listening to the singing of the telephone lines that ran alongside the rails gave one a sense of unintended harmony between the modern world and the nature it all too often attempts to impose itself on. I made small cut-out pictures, placed them alongside the train tracks and in the long grass and photographed them – a picture story to send to my daughter – all the time with the sound of these long harp strings in my ears - JrF

Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder
Gruenrekorder / Germany / 2012 / GrDl 106 / LC 09488

review by Cheryl Tipp:

Estonian Strings -- Jez riley French
(Gruenrekorder)

Jez riley French is well known for his work exploring sounds that are 
normally hidden from the general listener. His recordings bring forth 
new life into environments that are not actively forthcoming when it 
comes to sharing their acoustic qualities, thereby opening up new sound 
environments to explore.

"Estonian Strings" is the latest offering from French and takes the form 
of a 42 minute composition based on recordings made during his first 
trip to Estonia in the spring of 2009. With his constant desire to 
investigate new sonic sources, French applied his contact microphones to 
a variety of "found strings".

"I found transmitter cables, long chimney support cables, disused piano 
wires stretched across old farm utensils, rust covered fences -- each 
one a surprise, a discovery and a joy to listen to."

The result of this foray into the unknown is a select series of field 
recordings that have been patiently worked together to create a 
pulsating, otherworldly piece that quietly beckons to the listener. 
Headphones are a definite must if you want to fully appreciate the 
multilayered intricacies of this work. With headphones, 'Estonian 
Strings' takes on an almost mesmeric quality; the piece is unhurried and 
minimal, yet it seems almost impossible to remove oneself from this 
strange world. The changing tone of the work is unquestionably subtle, 
but there is enough happening to retain more than a passing interest in 
the content.

With his ear for the unusual and an unflinching curiosity, French once 
again opens up a portal to reveal a wealth of usually concealed sounds. 
Just the right balance has been struck between content and composition 
here, making 'Estonian Strings' an intriguing and enjoyable listening 
experience. ct

over the past three + decades of listening, I have gathered an archive of extended recordings in church spaces, mainly from across europe. A hard drive crash on a pc laptop combined with an external hard drive fault means that much of this archive is now 'elsewhere' - in a space that is not accessible to us. somehow, whilst frustrating on one level, this seems to be a natural event for these artefacts....

it also raised a question about how individual artists / recordists (whatever term you choose) work is perceived. I have recently had a few conversations with a friend about the fact that I have not pursued an artistic career in the traditional sense & it is true that my interest in listening, recording & composing / creating works has been driven by my passion for these moments rather than an attempt to become 'well known'.

I am increasingly uncomfortable with the way making work public can create false images, unclear perceptions.

I make some work public, some not. some is still available & some, like this archive of church space recordings, is now elsewhere. what does this mean ? how does the act of listening to these spaces for the past 30+ years exist ? it seems to me that in the pursuit of 'sound art' the act of listening is being overlooked, the fact that many, many people have spent years & years listening to these spaces is being ignored & sometimes is replaced by a sense that only certain approaches can unlock the true worth of these sounds, these spaces.

is there a way to present recordings of such spaces in a different way ? is it simply the case that we should allow listening to exist without the need to glorify the results above & beyond framing what they are in themselves ?

three new releases coming soon:

Jez riley French - 'estonian strings' (gruenrekorder) digital release series

Jez riley French - 'instamatic: snowdonia' (engraved glass) cd & download

Jez riley French & Hankil Ryu - 'bird cage wallpaper' (. point engraved) cd & download

as part of the new series of 'bang goes the theory', the BBC science series, you can watch Chris Waston as he listens to the sounds of snails, centipedes & maggots using one of my JrF c-series contact microphones.

here's an extract of the centipede recording (thanks to Chris Watson for permission to use this recording here)

The programme is available to view online via the BBC i-player for the next few days:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00q6vht

for those outside the UK the clip is also available on the BBC's youtube channel:

a quiet position: wildeye edition

20 field recordings by some of the nice folks who've attended the Wildeye Location Sound recording courses with myself & Chris Watson over the last few years....and a couple by myself....

free to download....enjoy !

Forced rhubarb (extract) - headphones required ! by JezrileyFrench

a short extract from one of several long recordings made in the famous Rhubarb triangle of West Yorkshire. I spent several hours in the heated, unlit growing sheds, listening intently to the fascinating sounds of the rhubarb growing - yes, the small pops & crackles you can hear on here are the actual sound forced rhubarb makes as it grows at super speed.

you will need headphones to really hear the most on this recording....

available now:

'praha - favourite sounds of'

ep.014

25 recordings by Peter Cusack, John Grzinich, Jez riley French, Milos Vojtechovsky, Michal Kindernay, Lloyd Dunn, Stanislav Abraham, Udo Noll & Matthew Sansom

73 minutes exploring the sound of everyday prague.

postage options

UK £6.00 GBP rest of world £8.00 GBP

Prague soundings

The tracks on the CD are selected from several hundreds Prague soundscape recordings collected for the occasion of ‘The Favourite Prague Sounds’ which was set in up in 2008 as a collaborative project of artistic and interdisciplinary research. It was an attempt to assist an outline of contemporary topology of the quickly transforming urban soundscape of Prague. Initiated by two Berlin based curators Gaby Hartel and Frank Kaspar in cooperation with Michal Rataj and Miloš Vojtěchovský and produced in the framework of radio d-cz, several outputs have been accomplished: workshops, radio plays, exhibition, performances and web presentation. Authors Peter Cusack and Miloš Vojtěchovský approached and started dialogues with different people, artists, musicians, students and the result was ongoing web database with contributors from Czechia and abroad. To select the “right” sounds for the CD was hard job and in a way the collection is constructed on stochastic principal. Each track has a different story, the recordist a different strategy, each location sounds differently. There are by chance a lot of machines sounds and especially railroads, since the trains seems to be audible almost everywhere around the city, but it does not mean there could not be composed completely another other interpretation of Prague sounds.

Recordings of a “natural” wilderness environment could sometimes be appreciated as a higher style of musical expression, in contradiction to the sound pollution of any industrial or postindustrial city of the 21st century. The sonic atmosphere of a contemporary city seems to the majority of its citizens rather diffuse, boring, standardized, and taken over by the ambience of machinery or commerce, traffic, and the mishmash or curtain of reproduced music. The tendency towards the “regression” of a sonic identity of a 21st century town, evolving towards the globalized urban sound of a metropolis, is considered by many as a real problem. Still, this symptom can perhaps be taken as an inspiring starting point for further reworking, appreciation and artistic apprehension.

On closer observation, urban soundscapes seems to be negative and disturbing only if we observe or listen to it from the point of a hypersensitive device or “universal surveillance ear”. Prague, like any other big city, offers - besides the “global hum” - a rich variety of different ambiences and locations, each specific to the exact place you stand and how are you able to hear it. The city appears then as a complex living organism, driven by changing scores of multiple sonic lines and niches. If listener is able to navigate or “browse” through them, they can select and perceive them carefully.

If a pedestrian moves out from a busy business street or an underground stairway to the river bank, entering the passages and parks, climbing up to the attics, roofs, and towers, and descending into the “guts” of the town, the musical cacophony of the city dissolves gradually into fine and evolving textures of sonic micro-narratives, images and compound interacting motifs. At night, when the traffic fades out, it is suddenly easy to detect the fabric of almost subliminal noises, hidden by day in the noise of airplanes, cars, trains, the honking of vehicles, etc.

When Peter Cusack came to Prague he was surprised by the sound of air-raid sirens, taking place every first wednesday of month. This is a rather unusual regular event for someone coming from England and most European towns. Peter was also very interested and surprised by the fact that you can approach the railway so easily to listen to it. He noticed that trains are to be found more or less everywhere in Prague. He also noticed that there are many natural sounds in Prague which you wouldn’t guess exist if you didn’t pay attention to them. In fact, there may be more sounds of nature in Prague than in London. It seems that parks in Prague are wilder than those in most cities in the UK, and that the variety of different species could be higher. What about the other European towns? There is still not much comparative research on the phenomenology of the Everyday Acoustics available.

Milos Vojtěchovsky

------------------------------------------------------------------

‘four quietudes - prague’ - Jez riley French

I capture moments - often times of quietude - moments of stillness within daily life. as I listen I become more and more fascinated by the smallest detail - micro-listening - even the sound of the bag on which I placed the microphone coming to rest; tiny movements - changing ones perception, these four 2 minute quietudes are to me like intuitive compositions or minimal improvisation - the joy of listening closer, deeper is something I am very glad to know....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

new release

Jez riley French - 'resonances / residences'

two compositions for untreated field recordings & locale

'this is 'slow' music - its about listening, that delicate and overlooked aspect of our lives'

resonances di topolo

aquatic life in a stream | ants eating an apricot | balustrades (day) | balustrades (night)

recorded & composed as part of a residency at stazione di topolo, italy - july 2011

residences de lumiere

light supports along the hozugawa river | neon light in seoul | balustrades of the seoul tower | light supports along the hozugawa river

composed for the ‘lighthouse relay’ project, commissioned by folkstone fringe for the folkstone triennial 2011

recordings made on a concert tour of japan & during a residency at mullae art space, seoul, korea - june 2011

****

....if you so wish

the pieces on this cd can be listened to in the following manner

listen, at the quietest time of the day, with a window slightly open - the volume of the music resting alongside (but not above) that of the locale....

in this way,

each experience of listening is a new realisation of the scores

****

engraved glass egcd040

price options

UK £6.00 GBP rest of world £8.00 GBP

interview with JrF on the 'sonic terrain' website

click here