A disastrous day into Manchester
23 March 2021
I planned to get some pie in Manchester and it did not go well. Although I grabbed the Soma Ether and the field recorder on my way out I almost forgot to listen in on the very short trip up the track. It was one of the new 195 class and there was a lot of interesting noise I didn’t record.
From Picadilly I walked to the Northern Quarter but both the pie shop and the doughnut shop were closed and I bought some expensive beer and went to go listen to the trams. I’ve previously used another electromagnetic detector (rounds and rounds of copper wire soldered to a jack cable) but I can’t find where those files are and the Ether seems to work more with interference and finds different noises. The weird part is mainly you can see what’s giving off the noise, lamps, billboards, cars passing whatever, but walking about I kept hearing things I couldn’t pinpoint the thing giving it off.
Weirdly it reminded me of the Levenshulme Hum people were complaining about about a year ago as we entered lockdown. A repetitive noise going for hours which some people could hear and most could not. People were blaming McVities which I thought was dumb but some days when the wind is right you can smell hobnob baking.
Walking off Stevenson Square to Hilton Street this is what I heard:
https://soundcloud.com/reuben-gibbons/nq-hum-and-builders
Then I walked to Piccadilly Gardens and listened to the trams but the ether didn’t seem to be sensitive enough to pick up the changes from the overhead wires or the passing trams, which is weird considering the unseen sounds it was picking up.
The weirdest temple of the hum sound was approaching and entering Piccadilly itself, up the ramp by the war statue something electromagnetic crescendos before you’re guided to the platforms by the new one way system.
https://soundcloud.com/reuben-gibbons/entering-picc
I missed the train and with the covid timetable there wasn’t another for half an hour, I got another to Ryder Brow, reluctantly paying the extra fare as whether there’s a secret plan northern rail zones where a season ticket from one station would be valid at another equidistantly from Piccadilly.
Unfortunately it was a diesel train along an unelectrified piece of track and the fumes on the platform were thick but I wanted to go home. I have a long recording of the entire journey but as we left the station things by the track pinged into my ears and now yours.
https://soundcloud.com/reuben-gibbons/picadilly-tram-and-him
I got a little lost from Ryder Brow, despite it being only 2km from home. Directly off the station which main feature is a squeaky gate was an abundance of traffic calming measures the like is being fought over in a culture war in Levenshulme. Ironically there were multiple modal filters leading to Mount Round, a road currently held in reverence as a vengeful god such that any change made will make Mount Rd angry and unleash hell fire and pestilence on the villagers. I reflected that part of the reason I didn’t know the area was that is poor, a lot of the culture war down the road has been about the filters benefiting gentrifiers and I felt like asking someone how they felt about their filters and would they want them removed but the only people I saw were busy picking up drugs. I noted the ease with which the car was able to pull up and drive off and felt that this too was evidence of low traffic neighbourhoods not preventing people from getting to their homes.
In some older estates there is an abundance of padlocked parklets, with benches and kept flower beds that no one is allowed to sit in. I saw one with an old tree with its top branches all cut until the tree died, a nearby telephone pole which still had branches tangled within it and no doubt the cause for the culling.
Again the big tree would have helped with the local air pollution and temperature control, a little on was another tree similarly treated.
At home I plugged my new clarinet barrel with contact mic drilled into it and patched it into the eurorack, I played around sampling and modulating some sound into the morphagene and you can have a listen to that if you want. It quickly became too hard for me to play with. I think next time I’ll record the clarinet outside the eurorack as the the contact mic lost the clicky-clack of the keys and my dribbly rasping breath.
https://soundcloud.com/reuben-gibbons/study-in-f-major-clarinet-with
