Mark Vernon: The Open Fund for Music Creators
Mark Vernon is a Glasgow based sound artist whose current work is focused on concepts of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and nostalgia. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with acousmatic presence, environmental sound, obsolete media and the reappropriation of found sounds. These diverse elements are distilled into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, multi-channel diffusion, fixed media and live performances.
An audio time-travelogue, a slide-show of the mind’s eye; projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listeners’ imagination by means of sound alone. Using a found slide show commentary from the 70s as a starting point a series of musical soundscapes will be created to bring these absent images to life. The idea is to creatively re-imagine the described images through sound alone, to create semi-realistic accompanying soundscapes as a point of departure but then to exaggerate, distort and playfully manipulate the sounds into the realms of pure imagination. Accretions of different times and different places will coalesce into a singular transformative work transporting listeners to a place outside of linear time, confabulating memories and experiences of long departed
people we can never know.
The intention is to bring to life these ‘missing’ images through a series of interconnected miniature soundscape compositions, activating the listeners’ imagination in the tradition of classic ‘cinema for the ears’.