" Drone Hill 225 - South of a disused caravan site [ elevation 225 ] and north of a sheep wash [ elevation 238 ] is a point where electrified wires descend from a hilltop and meet. Mr Harrison has been recording at this focus in varying weather conditions over several years using piezo-transducers and portable MD equipment. By this simple technique the entire hillside is turned into a microphone. " (original cd cover text)
Some time in 1997 Richard Harrison mentioned that he had been trying to record an odd phenomenon he had encountered on his brothers farm. Richard had for a long time been the 'go-to' drummer in manchester, playing for Nico's backing band, Dislocation Dance, The Honkies, Spaceheads and who knows what other outfits in the environs. He also joined in with Stock, Hausen & Walkman for the odd live rumble and was, with Martin Hennin on bass, the solid rhythm backing for an unknown unit called Stretchmarks that also counted myself and Rex Caswell as members. The phenomenon Richard was talking about was basically 'singing wires', fencing wires that divided a hilltop heavily exposed to the elements and responding over time with all sorts of sounds stimulated by the wind, rain, expansion in hot sun, contraction in freezing fog etc.
" That's exactly my kind of thing!" I exclaimed ...he knew, we had traded esoteric albums with each other for years. He produced recordings he'd attempted to make using simple piezo's from Maplins wired into a video film camera. It was all he had but the results were promising. I lent him some portable mini disc recorders and over the months he refined his piezo/crocodile clip design and continued to trudge up the hillside whenever he was tasked with looking after his brothers farm to see what song the wires were singing. Farm visits were regular, the fresh egg omelettes and boiled potatoes that Stretchmarks members sat down to after most rehearsals testified to that, and over the next years the resulting recordings proved diverse and Infinitely fascinating. I told Richard I would like to release the stuff on a cd, he seemed surprised but ultimately happy for me to go through two and a half years worth of recordings, select, sequence, edit and master them and make it public in a modest but snazzy sleeve. I hadn't heard much like it, though the australian artist Alan Lamb's name had been floating around, none of us had heard his original recordings of hi-tension pylon wires at the time, only some un-convincing remixes of them by other artists from a cd that had made it's way northwards. Really, for me, the only reference and inspiration that could be pinned down as a precedent were recordings by the intriguing artist Richard Lehrman, an american called Scott Gresham-Lancaster associated with the Artifact label had given to me years earlier in Amsterdam.
Of course, these days "lower-case sound", "phonography" etc etc is coming out of every sound artists wazoo but I'm certain that this release has stood the test of time ( weirdly it was used extensively in the soundtrack to some pretentious french science fiction feature film without any permission being sought ). It has certainly earned the right to cast a sceptical eye over all those audio wrangling whippersnappers and give a patient smile and nod at their naive excitement. It's only taken them 20 years to catch up!
m@w&2017
for more of 'this type of thing' go to:
hot-air.bandcamp.com