Objects at Hand is the result of an ongoing collaboration between Dirty Electronics (John Richards) and T M Shaw. Just before lockdown in 2020 Richards and Shaw finished a tour, Points of Failure, which involved building performance-installations in various venues across the UK. These environments, made up of DIY devices and found objects, were constructed in response to the performance spaces, and consisted of sound, light, smell, smoke and other sonic processes. Objects at Hand was recorded retrospectively in remote locations and then edited and mixed as a memory trace and document of the sounds, physical spaces and objects encountered on the tour. Action, uncontrollable instruments, unstable systems, performative failures, reimagined affordance of objects, playing with resource, improvising inside electronics, assembling and disassembling sound devices, architectural features are folded into this performance document. Richards and Shaw see their work as a form of ‘cybernetic wayfaring’, improvising with materials, feedback and new situations, as they continue, and repeat.
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1. Praxis [4:34] - coil, circuits, feedback, motors, metal sink, tin can, transducer 2. Imposed_Adjacent [4:35]- rubbing motor, interjections, radical nails, tin can, voice, large glass vessel 3. Opus 25 [3:48] - sparkler, filtered noise/whistle, hacked speak n’ spell, vowels, tin can, Tesla coil 4. Thinking in Time [5:35] - boat, creeky platform, gated noise, thrupenny synth, spring reverb feedback 5. Temporary Needs [7:18] - disposable cameras, large capacitor discharge, circuits, AM radio, prepared speakers, spark gaps 6. newCorpus [1:59] - travel, flights, hotel, coil, Dictaphone, large speech corpus, pd patch (disorderly jukebox
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Opal Tapes, 2021
