Ghosts

GHOST NOTES Words and Sounds by Danny Bright I am listening to a combination of airy and airless things.

Things that are real, unreal, and reanimated.

Deconstructed and reconstructed.

Fractured.

Things with patina of hands or non-hands.

With resonances of sounds and non-sounds.

Things that are falling into ruin.

I am listening to the ping ting plink of valves warming up, preparing to move air.

Ghost Notes is a Sonic Ghosting work that explores how musical artefacts are ghosted by cultural and historical memory and by the spaces/places – real and virtual – where they sound and have sounded, shaping the way they are heard and interacted with. The sound work is constructed from the warped, processed, fractured and deconstructed/reconstructed sounds of a handmade valve amplifier warming up, and a broken half-size violin bought at a jumble sale sometime in the 1980s. It uses multimodal sonic fracture to mobilise the ghostly, creating a “temporal disturbance” (Blanco and Peeren 2010, pg. xvii) that helps to deconstruct notions of a singular sonic present, and instead reveal the “the layer-upon-layer overlap of semantic fabrics” (Kim-Cohen 2009, pg. xxiii) that sit underneath the surface, in between “presence and non-presence” (Derrida 1994, pg. 13).

It offers a way to listen out for the ghosts that are revealed in the moment where “the present betrays us, where the future leaks out” (Bright 2020, pg. 138) and where we can experience the “intersecting temporalities/spaces/ memories that collide, cross, fold, pierce, to create a landscape of asynchronous sonic timespace” (Bright 2020, pg. 129).

Sound work available here: https://sonicghosting.com/ghostnotes/ References Blanco, Maria del Pilar and Esther Peeren (eds.). 2010. Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture.

London: Continuum.

Bright, Danny. 2020. Sonic Ghosting: Interrogating Space/Place/Memory through Multimodal Sonic Fracture. Falmer: University of Sussex.

Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. London: Routledge.

Kim-Cohen, Seth. 2009. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum.