Cai Gwilym Pritchard

I’m generally more comfortable working with analogue equipment, I picked up my love of no-input back in second year and have been experimenting with it ever since, adding and rearranging various sound modules (delay/reverb pedals, looper pedals, vocal processors etc.) finding a certain approach to making noise music. Early on I made very basic harsh noise, and while I still sometimes find it enjoyable to go back to that I really like to try and create slower less aggressive noise music.

This video is an attempt to use my usual techniques and incorporate them into the Noecelia Project. I loaded some of the vocal samples up onto my looper pedal and created a chain with my delay pedal, vocal processor and effects mixer:

Both the vocal processor and effects mixer have a reverb on them which I have applied pretty liberally. I often feel slightly wrong for using reverb so much in my noise music, I often feel like I’m “cheating” however who or in what I am cheating I don’t know. I find that it is really effective at adding context to a sound, with noise music and no-input in particular I find that just throwing out a bunch of weird structured noises can feel slightly aimless and unconnected. However with the addition of reverb the sounds are placed in a facsimile of a space. In which the listener may try to search for meaning or source of the sounds.

I think on top of this the voice, almost impossible to parse at times during this piece takes on a similar aesthetic to the use of voice in Skinamarink:

There is a similar quality to the sound in this trailer and this experiment, I think the old mixer and effects processor as well as heavy peaking kind of lends itself to a heavy analogue feel which I really really enjoy.

For this experiment I definitely went in a more subtle direction with the influence the material had. One of the versions of the speech Amiee recorded while whispering felt like a more appropriate one, it provides a kind of through line through the track which I quite enjoy.

The rest of the elements were more of an attempt to try and create more ‘standard’ music. Exploring percussion and synth textures I find interesting. I think there may be slightly too much repetition and the structure of the overall track needs work. I do like the emotion behind the synth in the first half, there’s a slight sense of desperation there which fits with the overall intentions of the project, I feel desperate, I feel like time is running out for us to change our approaches to societal structures.

I like the basis of it but I think I might need to make it less repetitive and find a way to make the Noecelia speech take a more core part of the track.

Historical context

In 1957 Liverpool city council brought a private bill to parliament to develop a reservoir in the populated Tryweryn valley. 

In 1962 They were granted authority by act of parliament, allowing them to go ahead with the project without requiring any permission from any welsh authorities or welsh inquiry. 

After much protest and opposition. The valley was flooded in 1965.

There is contention over how much this did affect the welsh nationalist movement. Since then there has been significant progress in devolution and protection of the welsh language. 

I am of the belief that a large part of the nationalist movement in the poorer, less connected North of wales was inspired by the flooding of Tryweryn and since the event the protest slogan “Cofiwch Dryweryn” (remember Tryweryn) has almost become a significant element in the drive toward independence. Trywreryn serves as a reminder to the pseudo-colonialist view England has toward Wales.

Own visit

I visited Llyn Celyn many years ago with my Brother and Father. It was a short and unplanned trip. I think I was expecting some great shadow over the whole place. But the rather distressing truth was that it was unremarkable. It was like any other lake/reservoir in that part of wales. The soundscape too, forest, a distant road, and lapping water. Recordings of which one could get from anywhere in the area. 

Often it’s almost like second nature when put in front of a body of water that we’ll try to skim stones or just throw rocks into it. I don’t know how ubiquitous desire this is but it happens often without even thinking. However on this visit my dad noted that none of us did this. We almost subconsciously understood this water to be untouchable, that it warranted a level of respect. 

I suppose in that way the shadow was there, just one we brought with us.

Ideas/plan

I would like to do something with this area. Right now my main idea is to go and take an array of recordings, besides more standard field recordings I think it would be appropriate to bring a hydrophone with me and take recordings from within the reservoir as well as any electromagnetic recordings I can manage. I think embracing the soundscape of Llyn Celyn instead of what I expect it to be will be an interesting experiment.

I think, taking inspiration from Moushumi Bhowmik’s Travelling Archive, recording the journey and process to Llyn Celyn will be a really interesting approach. I would be interested also in removing the barrier of keeping silent myself while there also, not trying to keep the recordist hidden so much. There is something to be said for sounds of a person/body in a place forcibly separated from the people/bodies which once inhabited it. 

I do also think some kind of visual element would work for this project. Maybe modelling itself after a kind of documentary, I think minimum narration would be best but some way to present the recordings made, perhaps doing some kind of musique concrete piece using the recordings also would be interesting, overall I feel that the process of collecting the recordings will be the most helpful way for me to decide what form this project will take.

Looking into modern iterations of industrial music I was pointed to the political leanings of vaporwave. I had been into the genre for purely aesthetic reasons however seeing now it as a response to capitalism really make sme see it in a different light. I read through Charlie Jones comments on ‘Vaporwave and the pop-art of the virtual plaza’. I see the accelerationist elements as slightly defeatist, I think it is still powerful as an anti-capitalist genre, it points to the vapid nothingness of capitalism, the totally soullessness of it. One quote that stuck out to me in particular was:

“Since capitalism is so omnivorous that defending the authentic no longer feels possible, accelerationist pop is lo-fi and avant-garde going on the offensive.”

I disagree with this point. I think authenticity co-opted by capitalism merely is a facade of what it seems to adopt. True, human, authenticity and experience is unmarketable. Drawing from the idea of Queerness=failure I think that authenticity is dirty, and unpleasant and therefore unmarketable. I think a prime example is the self-censorship that now appears on tiktok, with words like “lesbian” being censored as “Le$bean”, or words like “kill” being changed to “unalive”. It is a corporate sanitisation of human language because that kind of dirt is unappealing to advertisers.

I want to make art that is unmarketable, I want to express myself in a way that cannot be packaged. I suppose this is one of the reasons I love making harsh noise as one example, it is hostile, angry and deeply cathartic to make. I want capitalists to turn their noses up at it and not even consider trying to make money off it. As a now deactivated tumblr account once put it: 

In trying to find a second project for this module I’ve toyed with the idea of something site-based and something industrial. Annie suggested looking into the work of Emptyset. I listened and found the aesthetics of the work extremely appealing and decided to look into their process and the way they approached their creative practice. Specifically their lectures with Sonic Acts where they talk about the work that went into Medium. My first method of experimentation was to do a response, sort of attempting to recreate the sonic textures/aesthetics without the artistic context.

I went in with a very vibration-heavy recording of an acoustic guitar I had from a sample library and ended up going in a very dronal direction. I feel the structure of their usual tracks is of course not there but it was a step in the right direction in trying to create the feel. I think for whatever form the site-specific piece does take it might share some similar aesthetics but that is of course very subject to change depending o the context of the piece I end up making

Since being introduced to the idea of Anarchism in my first year of university it has gone on to influence my world view, it has been a framework with which I have been opened to Queer, anti-capitalist, and de-colonial thought. It acts not only as a political system but a lens through which I view the world and a set of principles with which I try to live my life.

One of the main things I find appealing about Anarchy is the idea of the total freedom it affords to people to simply exist as themselves. I find it to be a philosophy where people are the most important thing, and matter more than any other wealth or benefit. The one poem that surmises this attitude to me is “No Man Is an Island” by John Donne

No man is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every man is a piece of the continent, 

A part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Europe is the less,

As well as if a promontory were:

As well as if a manor of thy friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any man’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

It’s this attitude that works its way into all of Chain of Being, and especially this scene with Adam and the Noecelia. Adams’ entire arc in season 1 and 2 is his journey to, as is explicitly said in the show “join the continent”. One line that summarizes this in the original script is “Apathy is death”. The idea that Adam is only ‘alive’, in a more abstract sense, while he cares about People, and that his immortality is meaningless if he does not feel kinship with his fellow beings.

When I mentioned this line in a tutorial with Annie she pointed out the AIDs activist slogan “SILENCE = DEATH” and Ultra-Red’s approaches to silence as it relates to activism. I did some research and found a very interesting influence on Ultra-Red in the form of Paulo Freire. 

“[Paulo] Freire described the ‘culture of silence’ that had to be broken, for the liberation of the dispossessed to be realised.”

(Groom, 2021)

Reading more into this Ultra-Red seem to have the approach of deploying silence as a voice in itself. They state: 

“The equation, Silence=Death compels us to fill the silence with voices. However, silence is itself a voice: an object that conditions our interventions whether they be screams of lamentation, rage and its pleasures, or some other action pieced from our current affective state.”

(Liner notes for Ultra-red’s An Archive of Silence)

In terms of its relation to Chain of Being and the pieces as they feed into an album. While I don’t have any active and practical ways I will take this research forward. Ideas of allowing more room to breathe already come to me now. In the original script there are gaps for Adam to speak which are not present in these recordings, perhaps leaving that silence, and that space, would be a way to deploy silence as a voice itself.

In continuing my experiments of manipulating the various vocal samples I have I decided to try and use Ableton Live’s wavetable synth to create some more interesting textures. I find this approach really appealing as it manages to allow for really interesting digital manipulation while letting me utilise more synth-based techniques. All of these methods manage to maintain the ‘soul’ of the original sound recordings however I would maybe say this one loses the original feel the most, I think with the other methods you can tell a voice was used but (at least in this particular use of the voice) the words and vocal quality are essentially totally lost.

I’ve yet to decide if this I like this or not. I think the strangeness of the sound is still there and it still uses the original material however it feel separate somehow

One of the things I’ve been struggling to decide is what form this project will take, the three main forms that seem to be appealing to me most are an album, a performance and an Installation.

Album

This would be the smallest leap from what form it took before, I’ve always likened audio drama to be closer to the way music is published online than TV or film which is what it often feels most like it’s treated. This could be beneficial or detrimental. It would be beneficial because it allows me to show my abilities in and explore a different medium. Presenting myself as a sound artist who has a hand in Audio Drama I think is how I most want to be perceived in either world and this would be the most effective way to do that. I also would love to be able to explore this project in the form of multiple tracks with different mods, and the way I’ve been experimenting thus far lens itself best of then putting out an album.

The negatives would be that it isn’t so far removed from what I’m doing already, and so I am possibly not going enough out of my comfort zone. I worry that this would mean I’m not pushing myself into new territory enough and that I should commit to doing something I never normally do, like an installation.

Installation 

I’ve never done an installation before, during our installation module I had a family situation that meant I wasn’t able to do an actual installation and did a performance instead. This could be a really interesting opportunity to fully explore this medium in a way I wasn’t able to before. This would also allow me to explore a more visual side of things, if only in how the equipment is presented, however if I were to go with this I think I would go for the kinds of visuals I usually do when making a video or cover for one of my noise music tracks. 

The main downside would be that I don’t really intend to do installations as part of my artistic practice, I would be open to it. But I’ve always been more comfortable with a more production orientated workflow and the process of developing and finding a space for installations doesn’t really appeal to me.

Performance

This option feels like it could be very easily done as well as the other two, I think it would be most easily linked to the Album, and the idea of doing a fully improvised live set inspired by the experiments and pieces I’ve made could be super interesting. Not quite recreations but spiritual siblings, using the same elements to create something new in the moment. I have performed sound art before but it’s not something I do a lot and I love doing it, and would love the opportunity to do it again with a lot more artistic intention and thought behind it than usual.

My first attempt at experimentation was to take the only elements I had from this recording, the voice lines I had recorded. The idea of using only voice, and the use of voice in general has been something that has always interested me and in this particular example finding a point in which you are able to tell a voice has been used but not be able to determine meaning, in a way subverting the Semantic nature of speech, helps to contribute to the unsettling of normalcy I hope to achieve.

I think all together there is a sense of scale and mystery I am very happy with. There is also a sort of conceptual apt-ness in the use of something human to create a different form of life, and use of speech to create a different form of communication mirrors the nature of the fungus that the Noecelia is, as mushrooms grow from decay and death and are part of a greater cycle and ecosystem.

It was this philosophy that led to a the next stage of experimentation, where I took this piece and used samples of it to then create another piece, continuing this cycle of creation and ideas. Applying the process of the mushrooms to ideas and creation also further leans into the idea of the Noecelia being a semi-divine forest which can give information and is tied to the metaphysical realm of thought

This was an early attempt at a mock-up of the scene I’m working from as a source. I think using this as a working start will be interesting but also as a measure of what I’m trying to move away from. The idea suggested by Annie during one of our tutorials of using the elements in the scene as a kind of source to create a “spinoff” is really interesting to me. I like the idea of the two pieces, both the scene and whatever it is I end up creating sharing a kind of spirit in the shared dialogue and wider intention. I think using this mock-up as a reference for what I’m trying to move away from for this portfolio piece will be really useful as well as a jumping off point in terms of something I can pick and choose elements to keep and discard. I’m still unsure what exactly I’ll do and having something already made to try and reflect/contrast off makes actually starting much easier for me.