U44 | Fergus Kelly | Local Knowledge
Local Knowledge part 2_excerpt
Local Knowledge part 4_excerpt
format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies
all copies come with an additional art card on 300gr satin paper
release year : 2017
length : 51’03
tracks :
1. Local Knowledge part 1
2. Local Knowledge part 2
3. Local Knowledge part 3
4. Local Knowledge part 4
5. Local Knowledge part 5
6. Local Knowledge part 6
7. Local Know ledge part 7
8. Local Knowledge part 8
9. Local Knowledge part 9
status : still available
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(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
This album uses field recordings made along an approximately 4km stretch of North Dublin’s Royal Canal, between Ashtown and Phibsborough. They were made with a Sound Devices 702 recorder, a Zoom H4N recorder, a Samsung smartphone, and using DPA 4060 omni-directional mics, hand-built binaural mics (made by engineer Dave Hunt), and JRF contact mics and hydrophones. These recordings were made, on and off, over a period of about one year, at various times of day, in order to capture as broad a sense of place according to the influence of the seasons and levels of activity.
This is an area near where I live that I particularly like to walk, and is a popular strolling spot for various age groups, families, dog walkers, joggers, cyclists and people fishing. Over time I have become sensitive to its soundscape and how it defines the character of the place. A train line runs parallel to the canal across much of this stretch, and there are a number of small industries near the Broombridge train station. There are ongoing construction works in this area as part of the Luas tram developments. Parts of the canal are flanked by football training grounds. There are steel pedestrian swing gates at various points, and lock gates controlling the flow of water.
Traffic crosses over bridges at Ashtown and Broombridge. Dublin airport is not far away, and the sky is regularly crossed with planes and traffic-monitoring helicopters. There is a rich vein of avian activity with presence of crows, magpies, blackbirds, tits, robins, sparrows, starlings, gulls, greenfinches, wrens, swans, mandarin ducks, mallards and moorhens. Quite a few people responded vocally to my presence whilst recording with that inimitable Dublin character that is as much a part of the landscape as other sounds, giving it its unique local flavour. Most don’t get the idea of a lone sound recordist. Where is the film crew ? Despite the lack of a camera, one person asked me if I was taking photographs. A salient reflection on a visually obsessed culture.
The compositions use field recordings as the sole material. Some of these are processed to whittle down and draw out essential essences and resonances, reducing some sounds to long harmonic smears, deep tonal undertows and higher pitched shimmering presences. A lot of the recordings are left clean, to focus on the rich natural sound colour and dynamic, and to root the work in its place of origin. Composing with this balance of figurative and abstract elements has been the modus operandi for many years, as it creates a dynamic and imaginative interplay of elements, with a sense of incident and momentum that moves it away from pure documentary.
The work is about creating a space in which to connect with the sonic environment in a considered and meaningful way. Hearing tends to be relegated to a poor relation to seeing in a visually overloaded world, yet it is something we are surrounded by all the time, and cannot shut off from, even in sleep. Unlike our eyes, we can’t close our ears. My work encourages focused listening and a more active and engaged relationship with the sonic environment.
(Fergus Kelly, 14 April 2017)
: reviews :
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In ‘Local Knowledge’, Dublin-based sound artist Fergus Kelly offers up nine slices of finely-textured personal psychogeography. Documenting a year of Kelly’s regular perambulations along a 4km stretch of Dublin’s Royal Canal, recorded at different times of the day via an array of different devices, it is a deep dive into a world in which the quotidian is transformed into a surreal sonic odyssey. Like a latter-day Leopold Bloom, Kelly wanders seemingly without direction, his strolls bringing him in contact with all sorts of people and phenomena: ice cream vans, birdsong, fireworks, helicopters, train conductors, the traffic, the wind, the rain. As soon becomes clear, this randomness is deceptive. Sudden cuts and shifts in emphasis deepen the atmosphere, but also reveal the artistry behind the naturalistic exterior.
Condensing 12 months’ worth of recordings into just under an hour enables Kelly to deliver a rich evocation of a specific landscape that is somewhere between city and countryside. But he’s also happy to mess with the tropes and techniques of field recording in order to move beyond the limits of the real, manipulating various sonic elements of his material into electrical fizzles, mystical chimes and extended drones, dissolving his mundane surroundings into a series of hallucinatory moments. Imagine wandering around your hometown on magic mushrooms – all of the people and places you remember are there, but the colours are running and the edges are a little … blurred. It’s most disorientating in ‘Local Knowledge Part 7’, when a babble of cheeky dialogue – presumably directed at Kelly – bursts through the hazy clouds: “Are you waiting on your cameraman? Oh you’re getting the sounds, sorry … What the fuck ya listening to?”
On ‘Local Knowledge Part 2’, this reality distortion is achieved through swift edits and careful juxtaposition. Liquid swooshes that could be weir or rainfall, or both, swirl around their accompanying sonic elements in feats of impossible geography, occasionally threatening to subsume everything in swathes of white noise in a manner that recalls Seth Cooke’s Bristolian sloshes in his take on Stephan Thut’s ‘Aussen Raum’. But the best comes right at the end. In ‘Local Knowledge Part 9’ Kelly gives us a masterclass in bringing out hidden riches from his material, and in doing so, he moves far beyond the everyday. Here, ghostly, metallic echoes merge with construction site growls. The overlapping clanks of passing trains drive muddy, percussive notes through the gloom, accompanied by the numbing toll of an electrical alarm. It’s not not so much a soundwalk as a ghost train, descending through the underworld to some unknown final destination.
Paul Margree
We Need No Swords
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Besides sporting a pair of keen ears, Fergus Kelly is absorbed by the symbolic aspects of the life that surrounds us. At one point in the seventh segment of Local Knowledge, a kid – evidently noticing his engrossment during an on-location recording – approaches him to bluntly ask “What the fuck are you listening to?”. This innocent question might summarize the current world’s lack of interest for the core of every existential matter. Namely, the consequences of particles vibrating on the basis of laws that cannot be explained by shocked simpletons pretending to own “the” knowledge (no pun intended).
As far as precisely localized sounds are concerned, this album comprises an awful lot of material. Most of what we hear reverberates as rather familiar
(also to the gatherer, who collected the bulk of what’s heard in an area not distant from where he’s based). But here comes the touch of genius. Not only Kelly accumulated and sequenced natural and metropolitan events according to intelligent integrative criteria; he subjected them to a concatenation of processing phases that extract, expand and ultimately glorify their oscillating kernel. There is a big difference between simply catching the collective screaming of a flock of seagulls (not the band), or a bell tower, or a passing train in a normal context – as beautiful as those voices are – and perceiving the potential of a surrounding “frequency aura” blurring their definition inside a wider aural panorama.
What I am meaning is: this is not a mere list of audio snapshots. It’s a unique type of symphony in nine movements, in which the conductor is the lone element aware of how the combined “in-struments” will work after weighing up all the outstanding characteristics. In that sense, Kelly did a great job of turning the animate/inanimate naturalness of the sources into gorgeously resonant echoes and murmurs, thus helping the mind to anticipate the next stage of our path: the arrival in a place where “harmoniousness” and “silence” really mean the same thing.
Massimo Ricci
Touching Extremes
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Physical formats have seen a great deal of attrition in recent years, but the Unfathomless label has remained consistent. Their CDs are released in pairs, sent into the world like animals leaving the ark. Their high quality recordings, sonic diversity and unified design make them a standout in the field. This season’s releases only underline our high regard.
Picture now the lonely field recordist, walking a path by North Dublin’s Royal Canal, armed only with handheld devices, a sense of curiosity and a desire to capture the breadth of his sonic environment. But perhaps Fergus Kelly is not so lonely; after all, he meets many people along his way, who work their way into the recording. They are as much of the sonic environment as he. Yet while Local Knowledge‘s source material may be field recording, its form is soundscape ~ a meticulous collage that welds rain and wind to trestle and horn. The tone is slightly foreboding thanks to occasional drones and sudden, unnatural stops (such as interrupted precipitation). Yet an approachable warmth is also visited upon the set, thanks to the announcement of a nearby engineer and the cries of children at play.
What then do Dublin locals know? It depends on who you ask. Kelly identifies fourteen varieties of local bird, folding as many as possible into his recording. It rains, and it rains, and it rains. Traffic passes nearby and overhead. The sound of industry intrudes. Local knowledge may be this: that the area is a crossroads between nature and commerce, wildlife and humanity, the memory of landscape and the illusion of progress. And to Kelly, it’s home. The artist echoes the nature of our site by encouraging “focused listening”, but our listening is different from his. We’re listening through a second layer of interpretation: not just the birdsong, but the consistent circling back to birdsong, reflecting a desire to hear more of the same; not just the local populace, but the looping of their yells until they morph into sonic pollution (part 4). The recording also challenges us to define our own values. Are the fireworks in part 5 a lovely celebration of community, a terrifying disruption to the birds, or both? Do they interrupt our listening reverie? When the sirens sound, one cannot help but think of a celebration gone awry. Yet, this is what it means to be part of a shared community. We desire to escape the roughness of humanity and lose ourselves in the comfort of nature. Then we remember that nature can also be cruel, and we yearn for the comfort of our friends.
Kelly also suggests that his area may be pushing into the red of sonic overload. When piercing tones overwhelm the sound of water in part 6, one imagines a child with sensory sensitivity cup-ping his hands over his ears and curling into a ball. Have we already allowed too much? Have we pushed the crayons so hard into the paper that we’ve ripped the page? Does our home no longer sound like our home? These are the sort of questions that a field recordist may answer, if only we might take the time to listen to what they have discovered through their own listening. “Are you a news person?”, Kelly is asked at the end of part 7, followed by resonant bells, implying a holy awakening.
Richard Allen
A Closer Listen
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One of the more active composers from Ireland is Fergus Kelly and his work has been covered quite a bit in these pages. He is mainly active in the world of field recordings and for ‘Local Knowledge’ he made recordings along “an approximately 4km stretch of North Dublin’s Royal Canal, between Ashtown and Phibsborough”, with a bunch of microphones, binaural and contact microphones, and also hydrophones. The whole range as it were of possibilities to tape sound. Kelly lives in this area and walks there quite a bit. There is a train line nearby, small industries and a lock to control the water.
But there is also a whole selection of birds in the area. Enough to do a bit of recording I’d say and the nine pieces presented here are mostly presented ‘as is’. There may have been a bit of cleaning, to reduce an unwanted frequency here or there, but otherwise untouched. That is hard to believe, as based on what I hear I could easily believe there is some kind of processing going on. In the seventh piece we hear wind howling in an underpass, or so it seems, but it could easily be some snare installation. There is the passing car or bystanders asking Kelly something (‘hey man where’s your camera’ or something to that extent). In the ninth piece (all are untitled) there is some kind of rhythm, maybe picked up down at the lot of small industries? There are more ma-chine hum and conveyer belts in this one. The whole nature (pun intended) of these pieces is one of quietness, which is great. No doubt some of this was recorded with very few people around, ‘at various times of the day’, as it is said on the cover. In his selection, Kelly looks for something that can be seen as a ‘song’ or ‘piece’. Various elements that collide together on this particular moment in time and space; like the obscured hum and ventilator sounds of the fourth piece, with a train passing overhead and some bird sounds. Very still music, but with lots of power. This I think is a great release, probably Kelly’s most refined moment so far. There is no noise here, which is something that was on some of his earlier works a presence, but here it remains quiet and evocative.
Frans de Waard
Vital Weekly
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