In late January-early February 2015, I benefited from a Klingler ElectroAcoustic Residency (KEAR) at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, USA). I spent the residency developing materials for a 32-channel, hour-long acousmatic work, Going / Places (2015) and, as a bonus, I was able to record one of the most evocative sounds I know — distant railroad horns from trains heading who knows where?

A later concert celebrating five years of KEAR could not accommodate the extended duration of Going / Places. Simply presenting an excerpt would have made little sense out of context, so I decided to rethink the material to make a smaller-scale, more ‘manageable’ version of the work in 8 channels. Where the original tries to evoke the sensation of ‘being there’, this reworking is more like remembering a trip through ‘aural snapshots’…

A ‘rough guide’

This piece uses sounds from locations around the world (listed below), which are evoked with varying degrees of realism, surrealism or even unrealism. However, the logic of the narrative (if there is one) does not lie in the geographical connections or distances, but in the sonic journey: the relationships and contrasts — spectral, rhythmic and spatial — that I had enormous pleasure in discovering within a huge range of material, gathered over nearly three decades.

1. Italy (railway stations in Florence, Pisa, Rome and Castelfiorentino)
2. Australia (the Great Ocean Road, and the Red Centre)
3. Australia (the SkyRail, Queensland)
4. Iceland (subterranean glacial stream and ice melt in a cave on the Sólheimajökull glacier
5. Iceland and New Zealand (geothermal pools at Seltún and Rotorua)
6. USA (railroad horns in wintry Ohio) plus track sounds from the UK and South Australia
7. Australia (Circular Quay, Sydney, with buskers, ferries and the Queen Mary II leaving port)
8. Australia (pontoons strain at their moorings near the Opera House in Sydney Harbour)
9. Australia and Greece (underwater echoes of the pontoons, plus barnacles in Sydney Harbour, near the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland and off Corfu)
10. Greece (boats and swifts in harbours in Corfu and Hydra)
11. USA (boats at the yacht club, Boston, MA)
12. Malaysia (insects, frogs and monkeys in the equatorial rainforest, Bako National Park, Borneo)
13. Switzerland (piccolo bands parading during Basler Fasnacht), Morocco (ghaitas — double reed instruments — in Marrakech), Mexico (bagpipers — yes, really! — in Morelia) and Thailand (a religious procession with firecrackers counterpoints coins being placed in offerings bowls in the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, Bangkok)
14. UK/EU (wheels on the rails resonating through the washroom sink on a British train, plus friction squeaks from Eurotunnel carriages)
15. Morocco & Türkiye (calls to prayer in Marrakech — complete with nesting storks clattering their beaks — and Istanbul) fusing with Italy (singers on gondolas in Venice) and Australia (market callers in Melbourne)
16. In transit — announcements in airports (Bangkok, Brisbane, Helsinki, Dubai, plus my homage to Bernard Parmegiani — by including his indicatif, used between 1971 and 2005 at Charles de Gaulle airport, Paris, and still in use at Montpellier airport) and on planes, trains and ships, including a Venetian vaporetto
17. Australia (an insect chorus at dusk in Queensland’s tropical rainforest, pedestrian crossing signals at intersections and ships’ bells in Hobart, Tasmania) and USA (a Californian train bell)
18. Europe (bells from Chartres, Venice, Berlin and Corfu Town)
19. Italy (Notturno)

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Postcards Home was realized in 2017 in the composer’s studio in Birmingham (England, UK) and premiered on September 16, 2017 during the KEAR Multichannel Concert in Kobacker Hall of the Moore Musical Arts Center of Bowling Green State University.

I owe huge thanks to a large number of people and organisations for their contributions and assistance in the creation of Going / Places and, hence, of Postcards Home:

• Joe Klingler for funding the Klingler ElectroAcoustic Residency
• Elainie Lillios for hosting me in the studios at Bowling Green State University, Ohio as a recipient of the KEAR, and her husband, Michael Thompson
• the Leverhulme Foundation for a 12-month Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship
• the National Lottery via Arts Council England for a Grants for the Arts award
• Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, Electric Spring and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festical for commissioning Going / Places
• Alex Harker and Huddersfield postgraduates for setting up the HISS system for me to hear before setting about the piece in earnest
• James Carpenter and Chris Tarren for their programming expertise in developing signal processing tools for the work; these have been incorporated into BEASTtools, a suite of Max/MSP patches, available for free download soon
• Lisa Whistlecroft and Steve Benner for sharing their knowledge of places to record interesting sounds in Iceland and for accompanying us on the trip
• David Hirst for extensive advice and information about recording locations in Australia and for the use of his house at the eastern end of the Great Ocean Road
• the unknown overseas visitor to London who asked me for directions in the Underground nearly 25 years ago — I was recording at the time and that interruption triggered the idea of Going / Places
• finally — as ever — thanks to my wife, Ali for keeping me more or less sane during the composition of the work, and for helping me carry all the recording gear to far-flung corners of the world; I couldn’t have done it without her.

Création

• 16 septembre 2017, KEAR Festival: KEAR Multichannel Concert, Kobacker Hall — Moore Musical Arts Center — Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green (Ohio, ÉU)