Presenting for your approval the final set of recordings ever(?) made in BBC Television Centre’s East Tower, demolition of which is scheduled for this month and by the time you read these words may well have already started. This ‘Final Gathering’, produced as part of arts organisation White Noise‘s programme of artist residencies in the tower’s closing weeks, was produced by taking two recordings of groups of visitors arranged in the stairwell making various humming sounds and then playing several copies of these recordings together with subtle changes in pitch, attempting to create Ligeti-esque sound-clusters on a more modest scale – in fact the working title was £20.01: A Splice Odyssey. There’s a rather nice blog post on the White Noise website about this piece and it’s precursor ‘East Tower Dreaming’, which you can read here:
Furthermore, eagled-eared Howlround fans and/or lovers of Radio 4 might have also heard Robin The Fog talking about the project on flagship news programme The World Tonight last week, in which he attempted to give a brief introduction to the mysterious world of resonant frequencies in under four minutes:
— BBC Radio 4 (@BBCRadio4) July 29, 2016
Howlround 