The sounds and music heard on this site are digital transfers taken from grooves inscribed on one-of-a-kind cylinder records. All the individual works have been especially made for this archive or are revised versions of existing pieces, re-arranged and re-edited for the two-minute cylinder format.

Begun in 2006 and continuing, Phonographies is primarily a collection of physical objects where each contributing artist or group is represented by a single wax cylinder. This supplementary online archive makes its contents freely available.

All the entries have been recorded and reproduced mechanically and acoustically, using horns and early 1900s Edison phonographs (see Recording the Archive).

© A.Kolkowski

Recorded in London, November 27^th 2011.

Self-Made Percussion Instruments

Rie Nakajima is an artist, originally from Yokohama, who lives and works in London. She studied art history and aesthetics at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, and sculpture at Chelsea School of Arts and Slade School of Fine Arts in London.

Her activities are mainly concerned with creating sound-based installations and performances. In both fields, her work develops from observing physical responses to the context of spaces/places by using sound and visuals. For materials she combines found objects, toy instruments, kinetic devices, and audio equipment. She has exhibited at SoundFjord (London), Void+(Tokyo) , and has performed at Experimental Intermedia (NY), Milton Keynes Gallery (Milton Keynes), Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin), Phonofemme (Vienna) and others. She also participated in the performance project “a lot of pianos…” (2010), curated by David Cunningham.

rienakajima.com

Recording Notes

The third of four wax cylinders we recorded in my studio. The objects Rie played included the insides of a toy piano, a bell chime and various objects in tins which were all set in motion by small electronic devices.

resonancefm.com

Photo: © A. Kolkowski

Recorded at Bates Mill, Huddersfield, November 18^th 2011

Recording Notes

This wax cylinder was originally made for Evan Parker’s improvisatory piece Tesserae, devised for the ensemble and directed by him and commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2011. It was reproduced from an Edison phonograph to close the ensemble’s 75 minute length performance of Tesserae at the festival that same evening.

Recorded during rehearsal, the musicians formed a moving circle and took it in turns to play their stones into the phonograph’s recording horn. From right to left in the picture are Agustí Fernández (back to the camera); Evan Parker; Paul Lytton; Ikue Mori; Ned Rothenberg; Peter van Bergen; Paul Obermayer; Richard Barrett; Okkjung Lee and Aleks Kolkowski (phonograph). Out of the picture but present in the recording are Philipp Wachsmann; John Russell; Lawrence Casserley; Joel Ryan; Peter Evans; Walter Pratti and Barry Guy.

Evan Parker formed The ElectroAcoustic Ensemble in 1990 as a sextet to explore the possibilities of real-time signal processing in an improvising context. It has since grown to an eighteen piece chamber orchestra consisting of strings, reeds, brass, piano, percussion and live electronics.

Each stage of the evolution of the group has been documented by ECM records working with producer Steve Lake. Their most recent release The Moment’s Energy (ECM 2066) was recorded live at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2007.

evanparker.com

Recorded at St. Peter’s Church, Whitstable, U.K, July 15^th  2009

Bow Echo -  Improvisation

Aleks Kolkowski and Ute Wassermann first came together as an improvising duo in Berlin, 2003. They have since performed in Germany, The Netherlands and in the U.K. including at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival where they recorded their first album Murmelndes Lüftchen  (Seven Things, 2006).  Their latest CD, Squall Line (psi) was recorded during the same session at St Peter’s Church in July 2009 and features two versions of this wax cylinder recording, Bow Echo 1 and Bow Echo 2, where both musicians improvise along with their previously inscripted improvisation while it is reproduced from an Edison phonograph.

The Stroh viola played by Kolkowski is an instrument that harks back to the early days of acoustic recording. It has an aluminium horn and diaphragm system of mechanical amplification that is the same as used by phonographs and gramophones. Invented by Augustus Stroh in London and patented in 1899, the Stroh violin and viola became mainstays of the early sound studios where their directionality and loudness made them ideal to record with compared to conventional wooden-bodied string instruments. The horns of the Stroh fiddles, which can be swiveled up and down, can simply be aimed at the recording horn. They were widely used in the studios right until the advent of electrical recording in the mid-1920s.

Such unusual horn and string hybrids, which also included cellos, guitars and basses, were also often featured in jazz and dance bands during the 1920s and 30s and were manufactured until the 1940s. The Stroh viola is part of Kolkowski’s large collection of historic horned string instruments.

Recording notes

One of two cylinders made during a recording session for the CD Squall Line. The phonograph recording was assisted by the venerable sound engineer Adam Skeaping, who turned the handle and brushed away the swarf.

© A. Kolkowski

Recorded in London, July 28^th 2011.

Urtext

Urtext is part of my Catalogue irraisoné, a collection of 12 pieces for solo voice which I wrote between 1999 and 2000. In turn Catalogue irraisoné is part of my ensemble installation Everything You Need to Know. I wrote ‘Urtext’ as an hommage to Kurt Schwitters; I often perform his Ursonate and wanted to write a shorter study on ‘Urlauten’ for those occasions when there wasn’t time to perform Schwitters’ work in its entirety.                                                                                                                                                        

C.F.

Christopher Fox (b.1955) is a composer who sometimes writes about music too. He has established a reputation as perhaps the most interesting British composer of his generation, creating music which draws on elements of the experimental, spectral and minimalist traditions. Innately independent, he has chosen to conduct his compositional career at a tangent to the mainstream music industry, basing it instead around close collaborations with a number of performers, most notably the clarinettist Roger Heaton, the Ives Ensemble, Apartment House and their director Anton Lukoszevieze, and EXAUDI. He lives in London with his wife Susan and is Professor in Music at Brunel University.

www.foxedition.co.uk

Recording Notes

The first of two wax cylinders recorded in Christopher Fox’s front room in North London. Although the subsequent version (recorded with a glass diaphragm) is less distorted, his performance on the first attempt has the edge.

© Berthold Schneider

Recorded in Berlin on June 6^th 2003

 Voice

Phil Minton comes from Torquay. He played trumpet and sang with the Mike Westbrook Band in the early 1960s, then in dance and rock bands in Europe for the later of part of the decade. After living in Sweden for some years, he returned to England in 1971, rejoining Westbrook and was involved in many of his projects until the mid 1980′s. For most of the last forty years, Minton has been working as a improvising singer in lots of groups, orchestras, and situations, throughout the world. Numerous composers have written music especially for his extended vocal techniques. He has a quartet with Veryan Weston, Roger Turner and John Butcher, and ongoing duos, trios and quartets with above and many other musicians. Since the eighties, His Feral Choir, where he voice-conducts workshops and concerts for anyone who wants to sing, has performed in over twenty countries.

philminton.co.uk

Recording Notes

This is one of my very earliest wax cylinder recordings and was made live during a concert at the staatsbankberlin – the former DDR national bank in Berlin-Mitte that became a thriving new music, installation and theatre venue from 1999 until 2003. Phil Minton’s vocal improvisations were recorded onto two wax cylinders as part of a Recording Angels event entitled voices & etchings. During the second half of the concert, he sang an improvised duet together with his vocal effigies on the wax cylinders, reproduced from a giant brass phonograph horn.

The main hall where the live recording took place was vast and one can hear the reverberations recorded onto the cylinder which has become somewhat degraded due to numerous plays on the phonograph. Also heard very faintly during the first 15 seconds, is the voice of the soprano Anna Clementi who also appeared in the concert; her test recording was previously etched on the same cylinder, which I then wiped clean of its spiral groove with alcohol, although traces of the groove remained and were registered by the playback stylus.

A.K.

John reads two of his poems, the second is entitled:

Iniquity

The position as it stands is iniquitous
You punish those less able to cope
With your flat demands
Your juggernaut rules have an inbuilt imbalance
Your morality is left without a leg to stand on
As our upturned palms are faced with little chance of recovery
I trust your judgement implicitly
There are no excuses as far as I can see

The dreams are out there ready to be processed or propelled
To enable us to function satisfactorily
We need support from those who do not
You can only go so far with a project
That’s determined to blow up in your face
The last thing I want to do is to come to terms with failure
There are no excuses as far as I can see
I trust your judgement fairly implicitly

I’ve never experienced a fair distribution of wealth
My paltry income you tax right up to the hilt
Then you have the nerve and audacity
To exculpate yourself from any semblance of quantifiable guilt
I view your actions with wild and passionate distaste
There are no excuses as far as I can see
I trust your judgement absolutely implicitly
Sometimes life hits you as being such an almighty waste
The position as it stands is iniquitous to say the least

The palliatives of sex lies drugs and booze I flatly refuse
They only expose a propensity to falsely defuse
You say you can put things right in a jiffy
I say that you and those like you can go jump in the Liffey
There are simply no valid excuses as far as I can see
And you can go to Hell with your worthless
Judgements directed toward me.

*     *     *

Jazzman John Clarke is a beat-style bebop jazz poet, author, performer and recording artist. He is also a published poet with tall-lighthouse in the shape of his debut full collection Ghost on the Road. John collaborates with a variety of musicians & has performed throughout London, Oxford, Edinburgh Fringe Festival (2009), Amsterdam, South of France and in Italy with experimental & improvising musicians. Known for his dynamic and declamatory style John is a popular & sought-after performer on the London scene and has also run a series of alternative events in various parts of London, including Deptford, Greenwich, Lewisham, Camberwell & Shoreditch. His CDs include: Jazz Circus – What Jazz Can Do (For Your Life) and John Clarke – The Way I Like My Jazz.

Recording Notes

This was one of several wax cylinder recordings made by a group of poets in the studio of Resonance104.4 FM. With thanks to John Page. John Clarke wrote Iniquity especially for the occasion, the two poems were recorded on two cylinders and have been edited together.

Graham reads three of his poems:

They’re hanging the Nazis….

They’re hanging the Nazis
Two by two
Two by two
One for me and one for you
Two by two
Two by two

They’re hanging the Nazis
Two by two
Two by two
One for Christian one for Jew
Two by two
Two by two

They’re hanging the Nazis
In a shed
In a shed
Tightens the rope around the head
In a shed
In a shed

They’re hanging the Nazis
In a shed
In a shed
Twelve million others dead
In a shed
In a shed

They’re hanging the Nazis
In a row
In a row
Mr Pierrepoint lets them go
In a row
In a row

They’re hanging the Nazis
In a row
In a row
Was it for justice , was it for show
In a row
In a row

They’re hanging the Nazis
Two by two
Two by two
One for me and one for you
Repeat ad nauseum

Game

In my game reserve
the wildlife all wear trainers
and amble up to onlookers
grinning from ear to ear:
‘Sure, you can take our photographs.’

Lions bake birthday cakes for wildebeest,
giraffe help warthogs reach top-shelf magazines,
tigers take beauty tips from zebras,
and baboons huddle and chuckle
over the concept of human rights.

Editing

Hit ‘em with a close up.
Nothing too gory.
That kid with his head caved in -
life isn’t like that.
Bodies with sheets covering them are fine.
Who shot this?

*     *     *

Graham Buchan graduated as a Chemical Engineer but worked instead in the British and American film and TV industries as an editor, writer, director and producer. He published Airport Reading in 2004, There is Violence in these Vapours in 2007 and In Bed with Shostakovich in 2009, all from The Tall Lighthouse. He reads regularly in London and has taken his work to New York, Austin and Vancouver.  His poetry has appeared in two dozen magazines, eight anthologies and The Daily Express, and he has also published short stories, travel writing and many film and art reviews.

Recording Notes

This was one of several wax cylinder recordings made by a group of poets in the studio of Resonance104.4 FM. With thanks to John Page.

Tiffany reads her poem W’althamstow H’eights

A’ were gypsy, loose as ‘orse:
haughty, hungry, nobody’s flame,
hare-bells eyes, slew as curse.

A’ thought he wouldn’t want me. Bu’ he did.

‘E drove me up t’ heath
for windswept walks.
We parked. Fidgeted. Talked.
‘E said a’ smelt of life -
his Valley Girl.
A’ named ‘im Darkling –
pupils so black, stars could sink.

A’ loved the damage in his grin
an’ the danger.
‘E loved me wild, but couldn’t let me go.
Oft-times he buckled, gripped, slipped –
called me Philistine, o’ Witch.

A’ writhed.
‘E said a’ needed taming.
A’ reared.
‘E brought a riding crop.
A’ howled.
‘E broke me in.

A’ thought, he cannot kill me. Bu’ he did.

*     *     *

Tiffany Anne Tondut is a published performing poet who charges her writing with all the passion, slag and violence arising from relationships; from falling in and out of love to depression, addiction and sex. A lyrical pulp-confessionalist inspired by Anne Sexton, Charles Bukowski and Todd More to Vicki Feaver and Lady June, she’s read her work on radio and for a number of institutions across the UK, including The Royal Festival Hall. She works as both a poetry tutor and artist’s model. Publications include Tim Well’s infamous RISING, Nutshell, Poetry News Review and The Moth. Upcoming anthologies include Oxfam Young British Poets and Split Screen. She hopes you enjoy her scribblings.

tiffanyannetondut.blogspot

Recording Notes

This was one of several wax cylinder recordings made by a group of poets in the studio of Resonance104.4 FM. With thanks to John Page.