Sound Palimpsest

The black surface of the tabula rasa and its use as a palimpsest for ideas made me think about the recording of sound. I think of it as being placed on an aural surface, layers fading and superimposing one another.

Not thinking of it in quite the same way, I had the idea a while ago of superimposing tracks I had recorded on a beach in 2017 to create a chaotic presence.

I recorded the wind in the trees during Storm Callum last week. There was no clarity, only noise, the sound of each leaf, every branch subordinated by the multitudes. They are themselves voiced scripts each erased on the surface of the ear. It reminded me of the littoral recordings. 

I shall experiment with these sounds and others: textures which I can correspond with solid sculpture in a way that I had been thinking of for some time.

Tabula Rasa

Introducing my (exogenous) tabula rasa. A palimpsest as yet untouched. Made recently, I approach it with the same indecision as that of a blank canvas. It exists in the uncertainty of what it will bear, waiting for its baptism with the first scrawlings of the mind’s eye. A black board on which every idea is erased to make way for another. 

It is where the juice of my mind will be extracted to create flavours with which to work. Rational though I may often be, it is the feelings and emotions that are strung together as beads along a thread of consciousness that form the shape of what I seek. This view has correspondence with the Indian aesthetic system of rasa. An organisation of affects that itself has an affinity with Aristotle’s poetics where he describes how the dramaturge uses devices to engender emotional states catalysed by the play enacted on stage.