Joel Stern mini discs, microphones, objects

I was amazed when Liam wrote to me to ask about releasing a live recording of a performance I gave in Glasgow in 2001. Partly because it was so long ago I could hardly recall it, but also because I had no idea a recording existed. It wasn’t until Liam shared the flyer for the event, that good memories came flooding back.

Some thoughts:

I lived in London from 2000 to about 2003, moving through a series of shared houses in Whitechapel where we were all involved with experimental music, noise, and improvisation. Rosy Parlane, Mattin, and Rohan Thomas were all housemates, and this trip to Glasgow was one of several short tours we did with various configurations of our friends. Most of us had met at weekly improvisation workshops run by Eddie Prevost from AMM, and we were all committed to a kind of ‘materialist’ approach to performing with objects, situations, devices, and gestures that avoided any recognisably ‘musical’ language. Our biggest influences were one another, and the shared context of London’s experimental music underground. When I look at the line-up for this gig, at one end of the spectrum was Rosy, who was all about creating impossibly lush and dense soundscapes, and at the other end was Mattin, who was perfecting a kind of anti-music playing with the disruptive potential of noise, and the expectations of the audience. My work was somewhere in the middle.

Listening back, I can piece together something of the process and setup I used at this Glasgow concert. I had two minidisc recorders, each filled with field recordings I had made over the previous few months, of industrial and environmental sounds, objects being handled and manipulated, microphone noise and recording artefacts, and glitches from broken or corrupted files. Connected to each of these minidisc recorders were a pair of tiny binaural microphones plugged into the input. The way I would perform is to play recordings from one minidisc through the PA, while the other minidisc was in record mode with the binaural microphones. I would slowly bring the recording minidisc into the mix so that the room sound fed back into the binaural microphones and back out to the PA. This created a weird remediation effect, a liminal layer of feedback that seemed to give everything a harmonic glow. Once things felt right, I would move the binaural microphones around by hand, feeding the sound back from different parts of the room, creating a strange sense of multiple perspectives, and picking up further layers of handling noise and contact with other objects in the room. It was obviously influenced by Alvin Lucier in some ways but was also a very intuitive and improvisational approach, and open to wherever the piece might flow. Around the halfway point of the piece I can hear a few little objects that I would ‘play’ in the room, in the vicinity of the binaural microphones. One was an especially squeaky CD jewel case that I would open and close. Another was a tiny egg slicer.

It's amazing to hear this music again and to begin to think of the experimental scene of the early 2000s in a more historically situated way. I like these sounds, but also feel very detached from them. Was it really me who made this? What motivated and compelled us to make these sounds, and be so committed to them as a community of artists? I’m excited to know what people make of a recording like this, twenty years later, considering this performance is as distant from today, as the early 1980s were from us at the time.

Thanks to Liam for reaching out and releasing this, and thanks to everyone who takes a listen. [Joel Stern, February 2023]


Joel Stern is a researcher, curator, and artist living in Naarm / Melbourne, Australia.
Informed by his background in DIY and experimental music scenes, Stern’s work focusses on how social, political, and technical practices of sound and listening inform and shape our contemporary worlds.
In 2013, Stern was appointed Artistic Director of pioneering Australian sonic art organisation Liquid Architecture, a position which he held until 2022. In this capacity Stern has produced and curated numerous festivals, exhibitions, concerts and publications in Australia and internationally, while developing artistic research investigations and programs including Eavesdropping, Machine Listening, Polyphonic Social, Why Listen?, Instrument Builders Project, and Ritual Community Music.

machinelistening.exposed/curriculum/