By Marty Fisk, PhD candidate in Electroacoustic Composition, University of Birmingham
On March 1, True Form Projects travelled to the University of Birmingham for a night of celebration and exploration of the East in West Archive – Archives Live.
The sounds of records from the collection echoed through the Bramall Music Building as the audience arrived; following them up to the Dome of the building for the evening’s. Trueform’s director, Faisal Hussain, opened the evening guiding us through the journey of the archive through a screening of the short-film Request Line, the importance of radical archives and impact of this work.
To give the audience a glimpse into a small part of the archival process for the thousands of records in the collection, all of the equipment used to photograph each of the record sleeves in the archive was brought over to Edgbaston and setup on stage. David Rowan, with assistance from Thomas Mee and myself, re-archived a selection of unique vinyls, including records from stand-out Oriental Star Agencies artists Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Bally Sagoo, the oldest record in the collection, and several film soundtracks which came into our care with radio request letters still tucked inside the sleeves.
The bulk of my time with Trueform Projects as a researcher has focused on the creation of original music based on the archive’s collection – work which premiered in Archives Live with the assistance of BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) and their 32-channel BEASTdome loudspeaker system. Working with Trueform Projects and their vinyl archive offered my first experience of composition using south-asian music, so I made the decision to use extracts from oral histories collected over the course of the project to form the narrative backbone of the work. Through my listening to these interviews, similar stories kept coming up: of community, identity, and simply of the joy which this music has brought to people’s lives.
With one of my specialisms being in the use of spatial audio, music from the collection moved around and above the audience, immersing them in sound and allowing them to re-experience these songs from a new perspective. As interviewees voices shared their memories of specific songs, from Lata Mangeshkar to Hans Raj Hans, recordings taken directly for the archive were woven amongst their words. Those listening carefully would also be able to pick out spatial-recordings from past Trueform events, such as our SUNO listening session at Handsworth Library.
It felt important throughout the process to not lose the physical nature of the archive; with an ever-larger proportion of the time many spend listening to music now coming from streaming or other digital formats.
The records in the archive hold their own unique form of memories, shaped by dust, scratches, warping and wear from their years of use, all of which have an impact on the way they sound. Capturing these properties, along with all the tiny mechanical sounds and humming of a record spinning on a turntable, played an important part in my experience of the archive, and were in turn amplified throughout the dome to immerse listeners within them.
Finally, we were joined by Mission Print’s Gerv Havill and Rik Cooper, and Adam Regan of Leftfoot, with stories from their origins in creative printing for artists and festivals and roles in midlands-music culture, accompanied by images from their own collections. Similar to the vinyls, tapes, and postcards explored throughout the East in West project, these archives highlight hidden histories of Birmingham whose potential have yet to be uncovered.
