Three recent vinyl releases from Mark Vernon, the UK sound artist, composer, and manipulator of tapes (which he collects assiduously).
Time Deferred (GAGARIN RECORDS GR 2041) appeals to me personally because of its skewed / bizarre and slightly menacing elements…it manages to sustain a pretty dark tone throughout both sides of its atmospheric grooves, and lives up to the “solo noir album” promise from the label press notes. Matter of fact “solo noir” is a nifty turn of phrase, suggesting an existential detective who only works on supernatural cases, and is photographed at work by James Wong Howe. Vernon seems to be working very hard to alter and disrupt his sources on this item, pushing recognisable shapes and images below the murky surface, so that if any half-familiar form bubbles to the surface it soon sinks down into his wizard’s brew and dissolves into a soft stew of sinews. There may be tunes, there may be buried voices, but their continuity is deliberately disrupted, and there are layers of distortion to further the sense of unreality.
I love a record that makes me feel like I’m dreaming, or lying on my bed of sickness, and Time Deferred passes on a lot of these sensations which, to a normal person, would probably be unwelcome, but not to me. There are found tapes (I assume), dialogues telling odd stories which make no sense or are never completed – I suspect these are retrieved from Vernon’s hoard of such tapes, which he finds on discarded answerphone recordings or charity shop cassettes, where the unsuspecting public have unwittingly been a shade too revealing about their personal life as they recorded a message for their wife or neighbour, little knowing that their indiscretion would one day surface decades later in the context of tape art music. In its construction, which feels almost “symphonic” in its sweep, Time Deferred manages to create a very disorienting experience, where the listener constantly asks what-is-it and where-are-we as we are dragged deeper into this nightmare world. In this fugue-like compositional structure, Mark Vernon proves himself much more adept at unleashing the terrifying power of tape than many contemporary electro-acoustic composers. Dennis Tyfus did the cover drawing; I very much like his work in general, and the black and red colour scheme here is fully suited to the contents of the album, but even so his odd image falls a bit short of being truly disturbing. From 21st January 2022.
The LP Public & Domestic Plumbing & Sanitation (CALLING CARDS PUBLISHING CCP007) is Volume 2 in Vernon’s Sonograph Sound Effects Series. Volume One was Sounds Of The Modern Hospital, which he released on his own Meagre Resource label back in 2014. What we have on this occasion is a large number of short tracks, much like a BBC Sound Effects Library LP (which Vernon admits he is consciously emulating), all documentary recordings of plumbing – sinks, bathtubs, toilets, mains pipes, boilers, radiators, drains, that sort of thing. Everything is carefully described by Vernon in his detailed notes, and the recordings themselves have been created with tremendous care, making much use of contact microphones or very small microphones in order to achieve that extreme close-up effect he’s after. If the microphone were a camera, we’d be seeing details of pipes and plumbing that make them appear huge and unfamiliar, instead of the friendly domestic objects we love so well; indeed the cover art by Marc Baines does exactly this in a visual way, inflating certain kitchen and bathroom fittings to such a scale that only the ocean can accommodate their grotesque size, and even a battleship is dwarfed by them.
I’ve enjoyed this record for the most part, which to me often sounds like plumbing going wrong as only our own domestic English plumbing is so apt to do; it might almost be a sound-art equivalent of the famed rant from Mark E. Smith, “made with the highest British attention to the wrong detail”. I do understand that Vernon’s intention is to “reveal the marvellous within the most mundane…sounds”, but Public & Domestic Plumbing & Sanitation falls a little short for me on that account; the watery gurgles and clanking metal somehow fail to amount to anything more than what they are, and I continue to wait for that precious moment of sublimation as I’m led aurally to the next watery outlet. Even so, this record has its unique charms, is modest and very English, and even slightly whimsical in its execution; “no two gurgles are alike”. From 20th August 2021.
More enjoyable to my macabre ears is Tape Letters From The Waiting Room (PSYCHÉ TROPES TROPES007). Even before you play it, you can tell from that title alone, and the eerie cover image, that we’re pretty much getting a semi-occult transmission here, messages from the beyond, delivered by séance and psychic forces. Vernon’s music here was composed as the soundtrack to a film created by Steven McInerney, a cinematic work which received several citations at experimental film festivals in 2020 and 2021, and was apparently made entirely by splicing together segments of found 16mm footage. McInerney intended to author an “existential drama” and explicitly wanted to explore themes of “death and rebirth” with his edits. I never saw the movie, but it’s evident that Vernon’s sounds here are in total sympathy with the project, taking the listener directly into a strange, spooked-out paranormal world from the instant the stylus hits the grooves. Disembodied voices, ambiguous fragmented stories from abandoned tapes (see Time Deferred, above), backwards tapes and chilling atmospheric moments, all amounting to a suitably unsettling sojourn in this strange world that lies beyond the Veil of Tears. Even Vernon’s track titles are evocative and poetic, for instance ‘A Photograph of a Photograph’ alluding to the mysteries that can be induced by the mechanics of refilming (and indeed reprocessing magnetic tapes, a process that he knows so well); or ‘Beforetime Guests’, a very lyrical way of alluding to the dead visitors arriving at the séance in the form of floating ghastly heads or ectoplasmic manifestations.
In my mind I can’t help connecting this LP to certain records by the Italian artiste Simon Balestrazzi, who has likewise revealed a penchant for the supernatural and the occult in his work, using the tape machine and processed drones as his private portal to visit the “other side”; one excellent example (and a favourite of mine) is the Candor Chasma collaboration, a very evocative set in which it appeared to be possible to travel time to visit certain famous mystics and visionaries of the past. However, Mark Vernon might not exhibit the exact same relish for the supernatural; although this LP is thrillingly weird, what comes over in the final analysis is a sense of longing, regret, nostalgia for the past, and sympathy for our dead relatives and forebears, some of whom appear wreathed in misery and trapped in an endless loop of reliving their past sins. Vernon has consistently exhibited this compassion and warmth, this connection to humanity, throughout all of his unique work, and this is further evidence of it. Vinyl release; issued with a section of 16mm film in the sleeve. Scry your own copy with a magnifying glass to reveal your own personal ghosts lurking in the frames. From 21st January 2022.