Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the Open Sound Group session, run by sound artist and friend, Graham Dunning. Graham has been on residency in Rea Garden for a while now and he was keen to get local experimental musicians together to create compositions based on the space and objects at the Rea Garden site.

I first met Graham at Sonic Weekend. To open the session yesterday he spoke about how his time at Sonic Weekend was one of the inspirations for getting everyone together to make some recordings. As ever with these things I was a little unsure of the plan, and myself, to start with but Graham explained the idea and everyone was very welcoming. A few familiar faces helped too, in the form of AAS and Antonio.

Alongside the familiar faces there were many I hadn’t met before. I was particularly excited to meet Dallas Simpson, Sarah Farmer of Lombard Method fame and Andy Ingamells. Dallas had spent the previous day doing binaural recordings of the site, which were available to all as a form of inspiration for their pieces. Sarah was most pleasant and had a lovely approach to sound generation and looping, focusing on the sound of physical objects on an ancient turntable. Andy really blew me away. A young chap with some amazing ideas. I love people who focus on the voice and novel ways to score pieces. His piece for the group was made up of a list of words and phrases he had come across in the area and was scored using a visual score, based on the boldness of the felt lines he had drawn on sheets at the site the day before. The rain had randomly altered the score, which lead to an unpredictable cacophony of sound, with all of the group partaking. Great stuff!

Overall it was a really inspirational and stimulating event. It was great to see the variety of styles and working methods coming together so well. Having been very busy for a while now, with workshop planning and midi-octopus building, this was a welcome break. It was all consuming, yet lots of fun. If the outcomes are as good as it felt on the day then we are in for a treat. Good stuff Graham!