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Tahitian Field Recording
Field recordings of different cultures and their music might seem purely anthropological today, even colonialist, but I suspect that back in the early 20th century, for those mostly without any previous means to encounter this music, there must have been genuine curiosity to hear these sounds. Early recording engineers could travel to the four corners…
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A Century-old French Spoken Vocal Loop: “I Let us Down”
This track was just a bit of nonsense really. Quite a bold statement to admit, but I also mean it literally. The original wax cylinder recording I used was listed as a home recording of a voice speaking French. Being a wax cylinder recording of over a century old (c.1908), a home recorded version would…
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Dedication to Sarah Bernhardt
One of the earliest actors recorded onto wax cylinder which I’ve sampled is Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress from the late Victorian, early 20th century period. A remarkable lady, a confident and independent woman, Bernhardt was one of the first global superstars of acting. She had a dramatic personality, love life and career, always being…
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Chiming Bells
For this “Wax Cylinder” track I took as its basis a performance of some Russian bell ringing. Catalogue No. 12516, “Chiming Bells (Orchestra Bells)” was a particularly old recording shown as being dated to ‘1898 or 1899’ and issued by the Columbia Phonograph Company. The introduction is too distorted for me to discern more than…
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Wax Revolution 9
The similarity to this Wax Cylinder project track’s title with The Beatles famed “Revolution 9” is, of course, entirely deliberate. I was interested in sampling some of the pops and clicks on some of these old wax cylinder recordings and seeing if they could be incorporated into a kind of glitchy beat. These imperfections are…
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The Undoubted, Unimpeachable Mr Jocelyn
Further to my Wax Cylinder project, one of the wax cylinder recordings which first piqued my interest was from a series titled “I.C.S. English Language Record” with a number listed after it. These recordings are of a language learning system which was first developed by the International Correspondence Schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They were issued…
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The Wax Cylinder Project
I’m nearing the end of a project I’ve been working on sporadically for the past year or so. In a previous release (the second volume of my Top Floor Sessions), I’d been recording music for use with some Dictaphone recordings which I’d made over the course of the past decade or two. They featured sounds…
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The Continuing Story of Carnoe’s Mummingbirds
Hello. Carnoe’s Mummingbirds? Carnoe’s Mummingbirds is an artist pseudonym for Mark Garner. Me. I’m a musician who has been around playing guitar (on and off) since 1991, mostly for the band “Granny Takes a Trip”. Why Carnoe’s Mummingbirds? This name has a history going right back to the early days of my band Granny Takes…