Stopstarting

This sound recording is the result of my Fellowship in Sound at John Moore’s University in Liverpool in 1998. Invited to work in a bunker studio in the arts building of this former hospital, I worked on a variety of ideas and structures towards this composition. I have always been interested in the concept of memory and place, location playing a large and significant part in my live improvisations. For this project I chose significant points of sound located in the city, partly from random questions to people, partly from self interest. From these I mapped out a walk that took me from one point to another, minidisc in hand, recording the acoustic data in that place. I wanted to create in a sense a sound shot rather like the opening scene in Robert Altman’s movie Short Cuts where the helicopter in the opening scene hovers gently over the densely packed city landscape and the film focuses or scans into the temporal moments in the daily lives of its inhabitants. A motion across a city, an architectural electronic scanning of an almost invisible sound wave. Liverpool like most cities has its very own personal sound dialect. Historically we can recall the sound of the docks, the railway station, the Cavern and early brittle Beatles tunes floating through the air. In a way I have attempted to capture what is an imperceivable and invisible language that helps us to navigate our way through a city. Voices, traffic lights, announcement speakers, buses, building works, footsteps, telephones, cash machines, voices, all manipulated and transformed into a composition that I hope captures the essence of this sound polaroid of Liverpool in 1998. The rather playful title of this commission is a reference to a popular media friendly jargonistic phrase to describe usually two Liverpudian men, fists clenched, nose to nose, salivating at the gills, stumbling across their words and punctuating every other word with 'eh?' as an unanswered question. This work was created in a very curious point in my life, when I was leading a relatively nomadic lifestyle. All my belongings were in a storage facility in King's Cross, London, and I lived in a hotel in Liverpool for most of the time, and stayed with a friend in Oval at other times in London. I had no mobile phone, no address and only very limited and slow internet at the university. It was in essence a very lonely existence.