Our guest lecture this week was with Jez Riley French, a sound artist who uses raw, uncoloured sound from spaces, with a variety of unorthodox microphones. Below is an excerpt from his website, jezrileyfrench.co.uk:

“Jrf is particularly associated with the development of extended recording techniques, including the recording of structural vibrations, contact microphone recording, ultrasonics, infrasonics, internal electronic signals via coil pick-up’s and recordings made with hydrophones.”

The lecture was really interesting, and understandably involved a lot of listening to Jez’s pieces. The first few showcased his use of contact microphones, that he creates himself. One such piece involved placing contact mics on a stretch of tensioned cable in Italy (Teleferica) and recording insects and leaves landing on and otherwise touching it. He also spoke about using buildings as filters; one of his series of works, Adagios, involves re-recording fragments of music using the buildings structure as a filter, then stretching out their duration by orders of magnitude.

Jez also uses Hydrophones, again of his own design, as well as a Coil that records infrasound; sound that we are unable to hear. One such work, Power Station, is a coil recording of a single light bulb. It reminded me of a device I’d seen online that could record other elements of the electromagnetic spectrum, the Elektrosluch, as well as Project Sky Cube, by Joanna White, an installation in last year’s Frequency Festival.

At this point he raised some issues with the overabundant use of compression in audio, making the point that audiences struggle to engage with compressed audio, and that eventually the ears shut down, as audio is brought to you, rather than you seeking it out. The rest of his works were from a trip he made to Iceland, where he made extensive use of Geophones to record seismic activity. Typically geophones are not used to record sound, but Jez adapts them to his needs. One such recording of a turbine sounded harsh and clicky, which Jez described was the microphones essentially malfunctioning, the element being knocked against its casing by the forces acting on it. He also showed us a few pieces where he had recorded with conventional mics, and showed us the omni-directional microphones he likes to use; DPA4060s. These expensive mics provide excellent, high quality audio, and also have no handling noise, something that often plagues directional microphones, especially shotgun mics mounted on booms.

Finally, Jez played us a short clip of what the earth turning on its axis sounds like. Recorded using geophones, this audio is something that Jez thought humans used to be able to hear/perceive, and has said that he himself is able to perceive infra-sound in one ear, perhaps due to the conditioning he has put his ears through over the years.

I thoroughly enjoyed this lecture, as it gave me a new perspective of sound. Jez often sits for hours at a time when making his art, listening while he records, waiting for the perfect piece of audio to be produced by whatever he is recording. Most of his recordings are discarded, the pieces he selects potentially ten minutes long in a recording spanning eight hours. He stressed to us that listening to raw, uncompressed sound, straining to hear all we can, was important to him. It is all about the listening experience. I’m definitely more interested in Sound Art after this lecture, and would like to experiment with the contact mics and hydrophones that Media Loans has recently purchased.