Workington Piano from ever present by Simon Bradley
An outlier sound artist improvising through found and altered sounds, oscillating between acoustic instruments and synthesis via environmental soundscape. A lot of what I do is listening to what is around me. When I’m not preoccupied with that, I’m recording and assembling instrument sounds and field recordings to produce installations, video works and sonic pieces.
I like working in collaborations.
On 13th August 2022, I encountered an abandoned piano in Vulcan’s Lane, opposite the bus station, in Workington. The piano was in a very sorry state and was clearly on its way to the knacker’s yard. Most of the keys were broken, jammed or warped, and only a few were playable. Of these, many required pulling back up into position if a repeated note was sought. I decided to sample each note in order to use the arbitrary array of pitches and timbres someday. I placed the recorder inside the piano and closed the lid. When I came to listen to the recording, the first thing I noticed were the ambient sounds ‘outside the box’, so to speak. There was something about the ambience together with the notes themselves that made me listen over and over, sometimes to one small segment of note and traffic. The notion that this was probably the last gasp of an instrument that had witnessed around one hundred years’ of piano players tinkling away upon it, spoke to me. The end of the line, ever present.
Instead of trying to re-arrange the notes, I have left them in the order I was presented with as I ventured up and down the keyboard searching for sounds. In the main recording, The assemblage is basically two of the found scales layered one over the other. In one, I have taken the initial attack away from each of the notes in order to smooth the landscape somewhat and enhance the sounds of the traffic, focusing on the sound between the notes. The other scale is stretched slightly, but I have not altered any of the original pitches. The first note I actually recorded is used at the beginning and at the end of the piece
Tracklist
| 6. | Simon Bradley - Workington Piano | 4:33 |
