Radio Residency Days with Mark Vernon

Sunday, 11th September 2022

This past week went by like a whirlwind. Mark Vernon (we may know him as director of Radiophrenia) came to work with me at LOOS for a few days. We had been in touch regularly online as colleagues, but after these days I feel like we have been close friends for years. I spent every free minute I had with him, madly dashing back and forth between LOOS and home and students, and we managed to create a 20 minute piece called “Light Cloud and a Moderate Disease”. I was thrilled to get to work with Mark because I like what I have heard of his work, the somewhat eerie dreamscapes, his manipulated tape loops, spoken word, field recordings. And we easily combined our ways of working, me focusing on recordings we had made of instrument builder Sahil Bahl sharpening his knives while Mark laid out lush amounts of material recorded in and around LOOS. I accompanied the tape loops he had created on the piano and we used walkie talkies to record the thoughts we had written down. I normally don’t get too personal, but Mark’s musings on a mysterious picture that he had found on his phone inspired me to put some feelings into words too for this piece. It has been uploaded here.