1: HEART OF THE HIVE. Sounds recorded at the RMG Honeywell factory in Kassel, Germany, treated and composed using Sony Sound Forge Pro II.
(09:01, stereo audio, 21.7 mb)
2: BRIDGE 1. Synthesised bird song.
(03:52, stereo audio, 9.3 mb)
3: AN UNDISTINGUISHED MARTYRDOM. Hybrid poem. Voice treatments using Sony Sound Forge Pro II and iZtope Nectar Elements.
(08:15, stereo audio, 19.8 mb)
4: BRIDGE 2.Synthesised bird song plus.
(03:52, stereo audio, 9.3 mb)
5: FALL OF THE HAWK. (Requiem for a Sparrow Hawk) Treated whistling that was recorded in a glass box gallery overlooking a hydroelectric dam in Limbourg, Belgium.
Front cover computer graphic by Kolbeinn Magnússon.
Rod Summers and Vittore Baroni. Summers’ reading of the first part of a four part epic email poem. July 2006. Written by Rod Summers and Vittore Baroni. Read and recorded by Rod Summers.
(29.49, stereo audio, 71.6 mb)
The Birth of Beward, Blimey!
I cannot remember exactly when and how it was, but somebody at some time in the past century invented e-mail. And while members of the general public used the new toy to lure naive little girls in the thick of the woods or to circulate ads of penis enlargers, other more enlightened individuals were chatting day and night on esoteric subjects such as Dodo’s bird watching in the Gulf of New Papua or George Papanicolaou’s Pap Test. Rod Dave Summers and me, instead, were getting tired of endlessly discussing Spike Milligan’s misspellings in the Goon Show scripts, so a new technological version of an old loafer’s game was devised out of thin air: let’s write a poem together, one line each, until we get fed up with it. Not a simple love poem, mind you, or a small existentialist haiku, but a whole epic poem, a noisy warmongering Viking saga that would take years to write through snail-mail exchanges, but only kept us busy for a few, em, years with the mighty super speed of e-mail: one line a day keeps the docker at bay (or something along these rhymes).
A Lennon-McCartney collaboration it wasn’t, but pretty jolly smoothly it flowed, my flawed English ironed and chiselled by Rod Dave, the story quickly taking quirky, qwerty and qzerty turns into the historically improbable and the outright obscene. The Surrealists called it the Exquisite Cadaver, we nicknamed it the Necrophorus White Pudding (ain’t as good as it used to be, is it?): we tried to squeeze as many personal obsessions per line as permitted by the laws of decency into tight couplets, triplets, quadrigae, freemason free meters, inept ad libs, never really bothering to check a medieval tome for the true gynaecological treetop of our Nordic hero. We deemed it more important to state how much Bew liked M&M chocolate drops (we all need a sponsor) and to indulge in graphic descriptions of Regal copulations on ice and Lego theme parks. We also cheated a lot, doing more than one line at a time and ripping whole paragraphs from Doom Metal songs and exotic weather forecasts. So how did this bloody Beward saga really begin, for gossip’s sake!? I don’t know.
All source material was recorded in Southern England in 1978.
The Blackbird Reserves’ (De Merel vervangers)
When the Cockerel crows your name you rise
And assist old Rooks preparing the day’s foraging party.
Four&twenty Blackbirds from four&twenty trees
(mutilated mammals roam city galleries)
Singing for leaves.
Once flocks danced with avian swerves
But now we’re reduced to The Blackbird Reserves.
+++
Als de haan jouw naam kraait sta je op
En je assisteert oude roeken als ze voorbereiding geven aan de groep die gaat foerageren
Vier en twintig merels van vier en twintig bomen
(verminkte zoogdieren zwerven door stads galerieën)
Zingen voor bladeren.
Eens dansten vluchten met vogelachtige zwenkingen
Maar nu zijn we vervallen tot de merel vervangers.
Rod Summers/VEC, Maastricht 1999. This work is dedicated to the memory of my father-in-law, Pierre Ewalts. Translation by Rod and Liz Summers.
Participants in alphabetical order, Icelandic style:
Alan K. Lipton (USA); Andrzej Dudek Dürer (Poland); Antoni Miro (Spain); Ayah Okwabi (Ghana/Sweden); Diane Bertrand (Canada); Dmitry Bulatov (Russia); Evindur Erlendsson (Iceland); Jesse Glass Jnr. (USA/Japan); Joseph Semah (Israel/The Netherlands); Keiichi Nakamura (Japan); Kurt Johannessen (Norway); Lucien Suel (France); Mike Dyar (USA); Raul Marroquin (Colombia/The Netherlands); Ruud Beerens (The Netherlands); Sergey de Rocambole (Russia); W. Mark Sutherland (Canada). The program order was decided by drawing lots.
Recorded and composed from June to September 1998 as an element of the exhibition titled “THREE”.
This audio work is non-specific so please don’t try comparing it with your own personal favourite third of infinity for it is unlikely they will match.
Space and territory and the priorities of living by defending.
1st. Movement – “Out Dreamt” – has as its basis a recording I made this year at three o’clock in the morning in an Arctic Tern colony on the west of Iceland. Expansive space. An incongruous stereo layer of birdsong from a deciduous forest in southern England is occasionally mixed with the basic sound as are the sound events of a calling Great Northern Diver, a ‘drumming’ Snipe and three male voices, American, Irish and English, counting to three.
(11:26, stereo audio, 27.5 mb)
2nd. Movement – “Raucous Chorus” – Kittiwakes on an overcrowded cliff preserving the gene bank by vocally declaring willingness to defend territory with violence if it comes to that. A Black-backed Gull glides passed looking for an unattended chick. The sound like a knife being sharpened on a steel is the chicks.
(11:43, stereo audio, 28.2 mb)
3rd. Movement – “Masters Of The Upright Stance” – the Tern colony where I recorded is being ploughed up, drained, flattened and grassed to extend the camping and holiday bungalow site. The Arctic Terns that use the area as a breeding colony are not at all happy about the situation! The wilderness is tamed, leveled and sanitised to make it safe and comfortable for those who wish to visit it by bus.
(9:55, stereo audio, 23.8 mb)
All three movements were constructed by blending up to three stereo layers of analogue recorded naturally occurring sound events. All post-recording manipulation was accomplished on a computer using different digital filters and special techniques I learned in my thirty years as an analogue sound tape editor. When a satisfactory ambient audio environment had been achieved short individual sound events were added (blended) to create the whole.
My thanks to Tom Winter (Hamburg), Jim Broughan (Dublin) and Michael Bright (Maastricht) for rehearsing and reading the text so well.
The Execution of Earl Magnus of Orkney An Audio Drama, 1993. Loosely based upon chapters 46 to 51 of the Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards translation of Orkneyinga Saga (Penguin 1981).
(31:41, stereo audio, 78.5 mb)
Cast: Liesbet Summers-Ewalts..(Maastricht)..Helga (Hakon’s concubine); Marshall Anderson..(Dundee)..Hakon (An Earl of Orkney); Magnús Pálsson..(London)..Egmond (The Narrator); Rod Summers..(Maastricht)..Magnus (Another Earl of Orkney); Sigurd (A trouble maker and sound poem); Tom Winter..(Hamburg)..God; Hubert Cuijpers..(Lyon)..Sighvat Sock (Sigurd’s brother); Lincoln Martine..(Maastricht)..Holdbodi (Awitness on Magnus’ side); Alan Doyle..(Maastricht)..Ofeig (Hakon’s standard bearer); Raven..(Hamburg)..Hlifolf (Hakon’s cook); Guest appearance by Josef Günther Kaspers
Recorded in Maastricht, London, Dundee, Hamburg, Lyon, and on location at Tentsmuir, Fife.
The master recordings were made with a portable DAT recorder and stereo one-point microphone on loan to VEC Audio from Hubert Cuijpers.
VEC Audio CD 0001 Two Audio DramasVEC Audio CD 0001 Two Audio Dramas
Two Audio Dramas
Track 01 – Helgi Saga Part One
(28.05, stereo audio, 67.4 mb)
Track 02 – Helgi Saga Part Two
(18:16, stereo audio, 43.8 mb)
The audio-drama scriptHelgi Saga was written and recorded from May to November 1985. Inspiration sources for the original story were many and various but the main ones were my Viking friends Helgi ‘The Turtle’ Fridjonsson and Þor Elis Pálsson, the Icelandic sagas; especially Burnt Njall’s Saga, and the Bible, book of Ezekiel, chapter one from verse four.
The story itself is a black comedy about the progress of a noble Viking who, whilst at battle on behalf of a Norwegian king, has a close encounter of the third kind with robot representatives from Cosmic Control. Helgi Saga is a sequel to the Fallowfield stories previously published on V.E.C. Audio.
The play has 34 characters voiced by 24 readers. Of these 24 readers 7 were Dutch, 4 Icelandic, 4 English, 3 American, 2 Irish, 1 Scot, 1 Pole, 1 German and a computer.
Each characters part was recorded individually, the pieces were then spliced together and sound effects added to create the whole.
Dedicated to Mother Computer.
Rod Summers. Maastricht November 1985, revised March 1993.
Track 03 – Sagara
(10:05, stereo audio, 24.2 mb)
Track 04 – The Saga of Brjan the Raud & The Scoring Technique in Cribbage
this is the original scratch symphony
from vec audio’s first best room
to uher Royal live
no poking around at that def wave
in more ram than herr zuse ever dreamed of
scratch is about
getting together and making a noise
no pointing and clicking
til your eyeballs plop into your cold empty cup
and there’s no more feeling in the digits
scratch is about
booting from a fun partition
so remain happy
and spin the scratch
which is about just doing it
— t.w.
no sampler no midi no dolby no dub no remix no baseball cap on backwards
Featuring Seven Performers
coen eckhardt * jenne van eeghen * det huijbers * john miesen * rod summers * tom winter * lisette wissen
Twenty-Three Sound Sources
steel ruler*nanciphone*sheep-bell*chinese flute*musical box*soprano recorder*chromatic harmonica c*blues harps e and f crockery*hohner orkester bravo*cardboard box*doorbell*phillips and saba cassette recorders*grundig wireless*teleton tranny*framus e-guitar*glass rod*honeywell heater*martell miniature*plastic tubes*voices
recorded autumn 1976 in maastricht — a vec production
