Thomas Haines sent us a copy of Supermarket Variations 1 + 2 from Essex, where he operates as Oak Hill Antenna – or uses that name as the imprint / label to release his “less standard music and sound work.” I suppose that’s his way of differentiating this experimental music from his [commercial] soundtrack work; he’s produced music and sounds for cinema, TV, and animation. He’s also part of the Brain Audio collective, described as an “artist-led sound post production facility”, where like-minded engineers and sound artists also working in those media can foregather and exchange ideas, and balance their commercial imperatives with their artistic impulses and practices.
On today’s vinyl LP, Haines offers us the treated sounds of the modern supermarket which he’s subjected to various re-recordings, layerings, and processing actions; the sound that most stands out, for him and for us, is the “bleep” of the barcode reader as a product is passed over it, a sound which he transforms into … something rather odd. Most of Side A is rich in these insistent bleeps; it’s like a very strange form of techno music, at times managing to imply that the machinery is on the verge of going out of control. That point of intersection between cashier and product isn’t the only thing that ended up on his 14-minute source recording; there’s also conveyor belt hum, voices of shoppers, and announcements over the PA, all of which leak into the final mix on Side A. The mixture of these things is what he calls his “systematic compositional interplay”, and he likes the idea that he’s allowing the tape to generate “extended electroacoustic versions of itself”. Some of the music gets a bit “busy” for me, and the actual sounds remain rather ordinary and don’t quite transcend the process. But it’s still a strong concept.
On the B side, he went a little further with the idea, using a piano, sampler, and ring modulator. Somehow, the barcode-bleeps have been changed into piano notes, perhaps by using midi technology or sample-triggering; in like manner, he manages to recreate the conveyor-belt drone by bowing piano strings. I’d like to know more; did he re-score the sounds and laboriously recreate them on acoustic instruments, or did computer software do the heavy lifting? In any case, the results – making much use of the ring-modulator to smush sounds together into unpleasant combinations – are quite unsettling. The A side sounds like an episode of jaunty fun picnic-time in comparison; on this B side, it’s as though the threatened event has now come to pass, and the newly mechanised society isn’t a good place for humans to be. I mention this as Haines recorded his source material in October 2022, the time of the second national lockdown in the UK; on Bandcamp, there’s an image of him masked up standing in a near-deserted Sainsburys in Chingford, and looking none too happy about it. Without explicitly referencing lockdown or COVID (thankfully) in his notes, Haines may be standing on the verge of making a poignant comment on it.
Other interpretations are available; a politically-minded commentator might find it significant that a barcode reader and the circumstances of shopping (and the computer system used to operate the whole thing) are the subject of an art-music LP, zeroing in on the exact moment when capitalism could be said to “happen”, and transforming that innocuous bleep into something menacing and subversive. However, his cover drawing – a blueprint which cleverly mixes the checkout desk with the tools of an electronic musician and sampling DJ – tells another story. Unlike some recent contemporaries, such as Belbury Poly or Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan, this record does not appear to be especially optimistic about modern urban life, and instead proposes a rather dark what-if scenario, using the ambiance from an every-day situation that we can all recognise and yet might tend to overlook. Unusual effort; good result. From 19 October 2022.