Stone Tape Shuffle by Iain Sinclair

I recorded Iain reading excerpts from his work around East London and then edited the selections into a sound composition for vinyl release. The piece frames Sinclair’s writing in field recordings of the area, including a recording of a walk through Rotherhithe Tunnel. The piece was released by Test Centre Publishing in 2012. Now hard to get hold of in physical form, it recently appeared to be on YouTube.

I wrote about making of the work during my PhD:

Iain Sinclair: Stone Tape Shuffle. Notes on listening to voice

(The ear of corn hears the wind in the barley.)

Voice contains layers, a stacked atmosphere. Each layer requires the other, re-configuring the atmosphere with each peel and slice. We hear the grain of voice (Barthes); suggesting age, health, feeling. We hear the compression and expansion of vowels; suggesting class, nation; the shibboleth. We find meaning contained in the words; syntax. The mode; speed, style, context. We hear the mediating space; voice on tape; the voice in the soundscape, mid-range kHz amidst low tone and high hiss. Different atmospheric glides shift our hearing. The grain affects the meaning, syntax can corrode the mode, technology can destroy syntax. When creating a sound work that contains voice, a singular voice, we use these aspects to create multiple meanings; multiple hearings. We lead the listeners through various ways of listening to the voice, each listening uncover different aspects, allowing different understandings, different ways of hearing.

Iain’s voice is in the mode of orator; partial prophet, partial teacher, partial priest, but in all cases a voice released to be listened to. We are allowed to hear. We are not eavesdropping. The priest whispers, so we lean in; the prophet proclaims, so we stand back (and we look up). When whispering we are intimate with him, a story is told, a connection made between the lone voice and us. When proclaiming the voice is distant, projected to the heavens, intimacy is misplaced, and we all, speaker and hearer, beckon towards the subject of stars.

Shibboleth: On occasion Iain speaks of people who don’t sound like him. Iain has a manner, a presence of voice that lets him belong to his own world; in literature the speaking voice is necessarily different to that which is spoken of. This dominant, literary voice allows him, in his world, to speak of those others who sound differently.

The piece contains archive voices, recognised as history through the shrunken bandwidth of the analogue cassette recorder. An embalmed voice to be heard as death, simply re-animated for a momentary homecoming of something exiled in history. The archive voice is re-animated by our listening. The archive voice has been presented historically through specific, and now well-drilled means, so we respond with the correct way of listening. Techniques to engender a historical hearing include:

the reverberant voice, unreal, occasionally used for ghosts or spirits;
the lo-fi voice, separate from the action, dated by it’s medium;
the fade-in, the fade suggests a voice that is always there but is just being turned up again so we can hear, then faded back in time.

A track entitled Nicholas Lane’s House, an excerpt from Sinclair’s White Chappell Scarlett Tracings, attempts to engage listeners in the mode of eavesdropping. By re-recording the original recording in a house, so letting us hear the goings-on in the house as well as the recording playing through a radio, we become complicit in another’s listening, so we listen with hesitation, not wishing our own listening to be over-heard. To be heard listening is to be caught out. Occasionally the original recording seeps through, reassuring us; this is meant for us, not for that invisible character stomping around in some over-stocked kitchen.

The final two tracks; Hand and Hyle: Ascending and Declining, bring the voice into the realm of music, so it becomes an accompanied voice; a voiceover, again, non-intimate. Our Implied Listener becomes generic; the cinema audience. The voice submits to the scene presented by that voice, it sinks beneath the vision of the imagination, becoming a black-boxed subtitle, rather than a radio-voice that determines the boundaries of the sound-haven. The track continues and eventually merges with Hand and Hyle Descending, where Iain’s voice sinks a little deeper, crossing-over, become a potential archival voice, moving backwards in time. By the end his voice is sunk, part of the reverberation of history, the bouncing back and forth of memory, until it can’t be recalled anymore, forgotten through volume so minimal it disappears in the upended, noise/signal ratio; buried.