English composer Mark Vernon can do no wrong for me. Today’s record A World Behind This World (PERSISTENCE OF SOUND PS007) was handed to me personally on one of the rare occasions when I went out of the house to listen to some live music at the London venue Iklectik in July 2022, where Vernon was performing live – at any rate, he was playing back his pre-recorded materials over a sound system, while operating the mixing desk. There’s no reason why we can’t regard that as a performance, and after all I’ve seen Stockhausen doing the same at the Barbican with his personal master tape of Hymnen. Additionally, the Iklectik venue was showcasing a remarkable PA system on this occasion (hopefully to become a regular feature), the technical details of which I’m unable to convey successfully, but with its multiple speakers it did go a long way to delivering the often-promised “immersive” effect for the listener, with amplified sound all around us and certain events emerging from specific points around the room with pinpoint precision, and remarkable audio clarity too. Ice cream for your ears…
It was Iain Chambers, the fellow who operates the Persistence Of Sound label, who handed me the record from his two mitts, although I did take the opportunity to salute Mr Vernon and told him about Zhu Wenbo and his tapes-in-the-trees project represented on Floating Tape Ruban Flottant. My thinking was that the story might resonate with Mark Vernon, who is known to collect and hoard tape recordings wherever he can find them. This includes tapes salvaged from obsolete or near-obsolete technologies, such as audio letters or answering machines, but it can also include voices and sounds from the radio, or from the environment; hopefully even imaginary sounds or sounds which haven’t even been recorded, or even happened yet, just waiting to manifest themselves through Vernon’s music in some future utopia of magnetic particles. I think the key to understanding Vernon is not the changes that he makes to recorded sound, but rather the way he arranges them – through selection and layering, he makes something entirely new, and there’s no need for extensive sound processing, manipulation, or mutations of the sort which typifies the practice since Pierre Schaeffer first picked up a razor blade. To put it another way, real life is mysterious and intriguing enough – if you know where to look for it and how to represent it.
It’s these mysteries which Vernon continues to present on today’s record, arranged here in four parts, and starting with the remarkable ‘New Golden Severities (Vermin Under the Stars)’, a 20-minute meditation of incredible delicacy and subtlety, revealing profound truths and meanings in even the most mundane situations. While this work continues to exhibit his preoccupation with suggesting radiophonic plays or imaginary film soundtracks, the story this time is one of his most accomplished – nostalgic, slightly sinister, ambiguous, delineating in deft sketches a beautiful lost world, or a world that never existed. There’s also ‘Fugitives From Bliss’, which I think contains traces of Vernon’s love of machinery in its fugue of slowed-down motors all growling like tigers; in his notes, we have the usual affectionate shopping list of sound sources including extractor fans, electrical saws and drills, and it’s these objects which he manages to “humanise” so well – not like Walt Disney’s animators might have delighted in bringing machinery to life in a goofy and sentimental manner, but by listening to the grain of the voices and recording them sympathetically, Vernon manages to hint at hidden truths.
‘Build the Hole to Suit the Stone’ conversely might have been derived from more pastoral and environmental sources, but I don’t know for sure and nor do I wish to have the mystery explained away for me. The work, called “a composed soundscape”, was produced specifically for the Scottish Sculpture Workshop which happens to have a radio station called Lumsden Live. Vernon originally did it in 2021, and this CD version is a reworking which condenses some of the material to album length. Well, this may account for the general ambience of workshop and sculptor tools reflected on the record, but as usual Mark Vernon effortlessly transcends his sources, never failing to deliver beautiful and profoundly affecting sound art. From 25 July 2022.