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From The Spectator - 24/01/2009
Kate Chisholm
ARTS - Radio
….
On Friday morning, we heard a very different soundscape on The Lake: scouring rain, sighing
wind and screeching terns.
Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland is a huge stretch of inland water, the largest in the British
Isles, so wide that you can't see across to the other side. Legend has it that a village was
buried beneath the waters when the lough was formed at the end of the Ice Age. A tolling bell
can be heard by the fishermen who are out on the lough at first light — and the whispering
voices of those who were drowned.
The Lake was made by that superb team of natural history broadcasters, Chris Watson (joined
this time by sound recordist Tom Lawrence) and producer Sarah Blunt, so we heard not so
much from the human life on and around the lough as its wildlife, following the seasons from
spring through to frostbound winter. The warblers, buntings and great crested grebes
competed with the sound of rushing water across the pebbled shore and the brittle tinkling of
ice-covered leaves blowing in the wind.
Vast swarms of midges rise up from the surface of the inland lough on hot days in summer,
having spent a year preparing for this moment of flight by feeding off the algae on the bottom.
The swarms are so dense that people have been known to call the fire brigade thinking they're
plumes of smoke. We were assured they're no bother to humans as they're not biting midges,
and that we should welcome them as it's the midges that bring the buntings and warblers to
the lough. But I can't say I'm convinced, having experienced the ravages of a Highland
summer. I almost feel I've been there anyway
From The Sunday Times - 18/01/2009
Features
Paul Donovan
The Lake (R4,llam) Full of croaks, quacks, burbles, splashes and a few easy-on-the-ear human
voices, this is a well-judged and beautifully edited portrait of the biggest (and oldest) lake in
the British Isles, Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland: its vastness and importance are well
brought out by the talented natural-history producer Sarah Blunt.
Pick of the day Phil Daoust
The Guardian, Friday 23 January 2009
Article history
Lough Neagh, that big, wet, sticklebacky thing in the middle of Northern Ireland, sounds like a
magical, fearsome place, the sort of natural wonder where familiarity breeds not contempt but
ever-deepening appreciation. Britain's biggest lake (380 sq m, if you're the facts-and-figures
type) teems with beautiful birds, fed by immense clouds of midges that, fortunately, are too
polite to bite you. It gets its name from a horse god, Eochu, and some say he still lives there, in
a drowned village. In the dead of night, if the eel-fishers are to be believed, you can hear its
church bell tolling.
The lough "gets in your bones," say the locals, and: "No two days are ever the same." They
talk of danger, too, and 112-mile-an-hour winds, and 10ft waves, and foot-thick ice, and cruelty
and capriciousness. "It's more like a sea than a lake," says one woman. "It's quite a scary place
to live and work." It must be noisy, too, what with jackdaws, mallards, reed warblers, great
crested grebes ... For a very special sound portrait, tune in to The Lake (11am, Radio 4).
From Disquiet Marc Weidenbaum 3 July 2008
Tom Lawrence’s Irish Forest Field Recordings
The latest podcast from the Touch label is a brilliantly detailed documentary recording by Tom
Lawrence, who’s in the Humanities and Social Sciences department at Dublin City University.
Titled “Donadea Forest,” after the Irish location where the sounds were recorded, it captures,
in a languorous half hour, bird calls, breezes, and the rain amid the trees.
One especially appealing segment introduces more traditional musical elements into what is
otherwise a collection of field recordings. This is accomplished by working in chimes at play in
the forest. Also complicating that portion of the overall piece is the presence of traffic noise —
it’s a smart moment, as humankind makes its presence heard simultaneously as tone and
noise, as organized musical sound and unintended aural presence.
To assist in the listening process, Lawrence has helpfully provided a time-code guide to the
work’s five constituent parts:
00:00-04:27 Castle Crow’s Cacophony (31st December 2007, 7.20am)
04:28-10:23 January Gales 9th January 2008 10.45pm (contains references to 9/11 forest
monument and the avenue of trees, captured with contact mics)
10:24-14:48 Forest Rain 12th January 2008 1.15am (extensive flooding)
14:49-20:36 Forest Harmonics 8th March 2008 6.20-11.50am (sampled forest chimes, forestry
felling, and the ‘carbon chorus’ [surrounding motorways]).
20:37-30:47 The Dawn Chorus (recorded on National Dawn Chorus Day 20th May 2008, 4.35am)
The set of recordings was made between December 2007 and May 2008, and was just released
on Touch’s Touch Radio series. The entire piece is available for download: M4A. More
information at touchradio.org.uk. And more on Lawrence at his website, tom-lawrence.net.
A review of Tom Lawrence’s Donadea Forest
Here, Tom is painting sound pictures with sounds gathered this past winter in Donadea Forest,
a 600 some acre wooded area near Dublin. Tom has created a half hour acoustic
documentary and wordless commentary that is exciting, thought provoking and
rejuvenating.
In five sections, bookended with dawn choruses, this piece takes us through some of the
immense activity and power that nature offers the quiet attentive ear and the well-equipped
and patient field Recordist. In 'The Listening Book', J.A. Mathieu writes “Sound is sense, and it
is more intensely pleasurable the more open your ears are. Naked hearing confirms the
sensual nature of the world. Love the sensation of sound in your ears. Take pleasure in
hearing. Feel how the great world narrows to a flicker inside your ear, and adore how it grows
into a cosmos when you allow that.”
The first four minutes, Castle Crows Cacophony, were recorded at dawn on the last day of
2007, and feature raucous crows. We are reminded that one plural of ‘crow’ is not just ‘flock’
but ‘murder’.
The second scene is a January gale recorded near midnight in January 2008. This gorgeous
recording of the sheer power of wind in mostly leafless trees also has underpinning rumbles
and rattles that were recorded using contact microphones in an area of Donadea Forest that
serves as a monument to an Irish American firefighter, Sean Tallon, who died in the World
Trade Centre September 11, 2001. Blocks of limestone, a miniature of the Twin Towers, carry
the names of the New York Fire Department, Police Officers and Port Authority officials who
died in the Twin Towers. This memorial is set in a specially prepared plot of native oak trees.
In his sound portraiture and composition, Tom Lawrence thoughtfully evokes the horrors of
the events with low crackles and groans, along with the persistent winds, which bring to
mind the sheer horror of ‘9-11’ and the state of numbness we were shaken into that day and
in the times that followed.
Scene Three: At the ten minute point, water, the universal cleanser, washes in, as rain,
soothing the windburn and virtual dust of the previous section. A gentle forest rain soon
builds into a thick and determined rainfall. Tom notes that there was extensive flooding. This
gorgeous recording has a ceiling of outdoor nighttime atmosphere, whereas right in front of us
is a near field stereo perspective of rain falling very near the microphones, with wind
breathing in and out as the walls. This is another meditation that sets us up for the 'Forest
Harmonics' section, the fourth.
Here, a tone insinuates itself, pushing aside the rain, and is echoed by other tones,
resonations of chimes. A bird chirps, a small gasoline engine revs, the tones form a chorus, a
bee goes by, and the smelly stutter of a chain saw entwine. In this midwinter night’s dream,
we are in repose where the I Ching of nature and mankind in it is being cast. We achieve a
kind of sacred state until the deftly inserted Doppler serenade of passing traffic enters the
sound picture. This reminds us that this forest glen is funded by a logging company and
bounded by the outside motorized world and the clockwork of piston engines. Tom refers to
this section as 'Forest Harmonics', and says it's “sampled forest chimes, forestry felling, and
the 'carbon chorus' [surrounding motorway]”.
This five minute movement ends with a sweet transition to the last (fifth) section, a full ten
glorious minutes of the dawn chorus recorded on May 20, 2008 - National Dawn Chorus Day -
starting at 4:30 a.m. The thick, delicious swirl of birds seems to have been recorded inside the
castle ruin on the site, so an echoey density is afforded the birds, and the - speaking of
carbon - large airliner that flies over six minutes into the section. (Perhaps the birds are
excited by this jet? Dreaming of their own high flight getaway? Perhaps we are reminded
that we hear joy in their singing, whatever it means to them. As Donald Kroodsma writes in
'The Singing Life of Birds', “Somewhere, always, the sun is rising, and somewhere, always, the
birds are singing. As spring and summer oscillate….so too does this singing planet pour forth
song, like a giant player piano, as it has now for the 150 Million years since the first birds
appeared. Ten thousand species strong, their voices and styles are as diverse as they are
delightful.” [The Singing Life of Birds, Houghton Mifflin, 2005]
Set into this very long time frame, we continue to enjoy the morning (mourning) doves and
other birds. Just near the end, a witty crow character returns to punctuate a la Puck, and
after thirty minutes, a gentle fade out delivers us: refreshed and somehow wordlessly
informed and renewed by a lovely sound setting and its respectful and artful representation by
a talented composer and sound gathering artist.
John Coutanche audio creator and educator, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Aifric (TG4)
'Aifric is an absolute cracker' Emmanuel Kehoe (The Sunday Business Post)
'A clever soundtrack'... Arminta Wallace (The Irish Times)
How the Irish Have Sex (TV3)
“How the Irish Have Sex, a six-part series, is frank, funny and fascinating, and wears its social
history lightly. There's a sprinkling of narration from actor Bosco Hogan, but primarily this is
simply people of all ages talking about their sexual experiences, and it's compelling”
Pat Stacey, Evening Herald
"A demure programme in which people of varying ages and libido function reflect with
intelligence and gentle humour on their sex lives"
Liam Fay, The Sunday Times
"Cumulatively, with programmes looking at sex education, monogamy and 21st Century-sex,
How the Irish have Sex may add up to a worthwhile sociological document"
Hilary Fannin, The Irish Times
"It was quite a thoughtful, unsensational programme about Irish people's sexual experiences"
Patrick Freyne, The Sunday Tribune
"A tribute to the empathy of the unseen and unheard interviewer. There were no agendas and
the tone was neither sniggering, nor judgemental"
John Boland, The Irish independent
Only Fools Buy Horses (RTE1)
'A decadent delight'… (Sunday Independent)
'The action moves along at a fairly zippy pace, ensuring that it keeps the attention of even the
type of viewer who can't tell a horse's arse from it's fetlock'.
(The Sunday Tribune)
'The odds are stacked in favour of this show being a winner' (TV Now)
'Traverse - the bargain basement buy - has really captured the public imagination' (The Star)
Mebollix (RTE2)
'An Irish film dealing with a man's fear of his impending vasectomy, is something to behold.
You want comedy? Put three guys in a pub and have them talk about the old snip, snip. GOLD
Jerry GOLD'. (Ken Hunt, Worldwide Film Festival, Toronto)
The Fund (RTE1)
'Tom's music for The Fund, was so integral to it.....we had a vague idea of the general tone of
what we wanted musically, but Tom gave us exactly what was needed. It was like he'd watched
the show before it had even been made!'
PAUL STEVENSON DIRECTOR RTE
Secret Sights (RTE1)
'Secret Sights covered over a thousand years of Irish history. Tom's music brought that epic
quality to the series. His music was invaluable for adding the drama to the dramatic
reconstructions.'
MARIE TOFT SERIES PRODUCER RTE
Carte de Visite (Animation Film)
'I found Tom very obliging and accommodating. He built his composition with the narrative in
mind, greatly helping the storytelling in the film. Our film 'Carte de Visite' is so much richer
because of his involvement'.
PAUL O'FLANAGAN DIRECTOR BOULDER MEDIA
'Whether it's the effects for a title sequence, glossy fluff for a
glossy-fluff commercial, an emotive theme for a documentary or the score for a full series, Tom
will always come up with the goods - with a gem or two thrown in for good effect. His open
mind and musical versatility are without doubt his biggest assets - I'd be lost without him'.
MARTIN DANNEELS RED PEPPER PRODUCTIONS
'A confession: I've put Tom's music on a cd for car trips. This music is wide, deep and
wonderful. I haven't found a landscape or streetscape yet that it doesn't improve. Even the
'commercial' tracks. Dang, this guy is good. I'm recommending Tom to every
producer I know'.
JOHN COUTANCHE Sound Designer / Editor / Educator
Dignified Kings play chess on fine green silk (Installation-Karl Grimes))
On Killed Striking: 'a compelling and haunting series of installations'
Rosita Bolland (The Irish Times)
Kate Chisholm
ARTS - Radio
….
On Friday morning, we heard a very different soundscape on The Lake: scouring rain, sighing
wind and screeching terns.
Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland is a huge stretch of inland water, the largest in the British
Isles, so wide that you can't see across to the other side. Legend has it that a village was
buried beneath the waters when the lough was formed at the end of the Ice Age. A tolling bell
can be heard by the fishermen who are out on the lough at first light — and the whispering
voices of those who were drowned.
The Lake was made by that superb team of natural history broadcasters, Chris Watson (joined
this time by sound recordist Tom Lawrence) and producer Sarah Blunt, so we heard not so
much from the human life on and around the lough as its wildlife, following the seasons from
spring through to frostbound winter. The warblers, buntings and great crested grebes
competed with the sound of rushing water across the pebbled shore and the brittle tinkling of
ice-covered leaves blowing in the wind.
Vast swarms of midges rise up from the surface of the inland lough on hot days in summer,
having spent a year preparing for this moment of flight by feeding off the algae on the bottom.
The swarms are so dense that people have been known to call the fire brigade thinking they're
plumes of smoke. We were assured they're no bother to humans as they're not biting midges,
and that we should welcome them as it's the midges that bring the buntings and warblers to
the lough. But I can't say I'm convinced, having experienced the ravages of a Highland
summer. I almost feel I've been there anyway
From The Sunday Times - 18/01/2009
Features
Paul Donovan
The Lake (R4,llam) Full of croaks, quacks, burbles, splashes and a few easy-on-the-ear human
voices, this is a well-judged and beautifully edited portrait of the biggest (and oldest) lake in
the British Isles, Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland: its vastness and importance are well
brought out by the talented natural-history producer Sarah Blunt.
Pick of the day Phil Daoust
The Guardian, Friday 23 January 2009
Article history
Lough Neagh, that big, wet, sticklebacky thing in the middle of Northern Ireland, sounds like a
magical, fearsome place, the sort of natural wonder where familiarity breeds not contempt but
ever-deepening appreciation. Britain's biggest lake (380 sq m, if you're the facts-and-figures
type) teems with beautiful birds, fed by immense clouds of midges that, fortunately, are too
polite to bite you. It gets its name from a horse god, Eochu, and some say he still lives there, in
a drowned village. In the dead of night, if the eel-fishers are to be believed, you can hear its
church bell tolling.
The lough "gets in your bones," say the locals, and: "No two days are ever the same." They
talk of danger, too, and 112-mile-an-hour winds, and 10ft waves, and foot-thick ice, and cruelty
and capriciousness. "It's more like a sea than a lake," says one woman. "It's quite a scary place
to live and work." It must be noisy, too, what with jackdaws, mallards, reed warblers, great
crested grebes ... For a very special sound portrait, tune in to The Lake (11am, Radio 4).
From Disquiet Marc Weidenbaum 3 July 2008
Tom Lawrence’s Irish Forest Field Recordings
The latest podcast from the Touch label is a brilliantly detailed documentary recording by Tom
Lawrence, who’s in the Humanities and Social Sciences department at Dublin City University.
Titled “Donadea Forest,” after the Irish location where the sounds were recorded, it captures,
in a languorous half hour, bird calls, breezes, and the rain amid the trees.
One especially appealing segment introduces more traditional musical elements into what is
otherwise a collection of field recordings. This is accomplished by working in chimes at play in
the forest. Also complicating that portion of the overall piece is the presence of traffic noise —
it’s a smart moment, as humankind makes its presence heard simultaneously as tone and
noise, as organized musical sound and unintended aural presence.
To assist in the listening process, Lawrence has helpfully provided a time-code guide to the
work’s five constituent parts:
00:00-04:27 Castle Crow’s Cacophony (31st December 2007, 7.20am)
04:28-10:23 January Gales 9th January 2008 10.45pm (contains references to 9/11 forest
monument and the avenue of trees, captured with contact mics)
10:24-14:48 Forest Rain 12th January 2008 1.15am (extensive flooding)
14:49-20:36 Forest Harmonics 8th March 2008 6.20-11.50am (sampled forest chimes, forestry
felling, and the ‘carbon chorus’ [surrounding motorways]).
20:37-30:47 The Dawn Chorus (recorded on National Dawn Chorus Day 20th May 2008, 4.35am)
The set of recordings was made between December 2007 and May 2008, and was just released
on Touch’s Touch Radio series. The entire piece is available for download: M4A. More
information at touchradio.org.uk. And more on Lawrence at his website, tom-lawrence.net.
A review of Tom Lawrence’s Donadea Forest
Here, Tom is painting sound pictures with sounds gathered this past winter in Donadea Forest,
a 600 some acre wooded area near Dublin. Tom has created a half hour acoustic
documentary and wordless commentary that is exciting, thought provoking and
rejuvenating.
In five sections, bookended with dawn choruses, this piece takes us through some of the
immense activity and power that nature offers the quiet attentive ear and the well-equipped
and patient field Recordist. In 'The Listening Book', J.A. Mathieu writes “Sound is sense, and it
is more intensely pleasurable the more open your ears are. Naked hearing confirms the
sensual nature of the world. Love the sensation of sound in your ears. Take pleasure in
hearing. Feel how the great world narrows to a flicker inside your ear, and adore how it grows
into a cosmos when you allow that.”
The first four minutes, Castle Crows Cacophony, were recorded at dawn on the last day of
2007, and feature raucous crows. We are reminded that one plural of ‘crow’ is not just ‘flock’
but ‘murder’.
The second scene is a January gale recorded near midnight in January 2008. This gorgeous
recording of the sheer power of wind in mostly leafless trees also has underpinning rumbles
and rattles that were recorded using contact microphones in an area of Donadea Forest that
serves as a monument to an Irish American firefighter, Sean Tallon, who died in the World
Trade Centre September 11, 2001. Blocks of limestone, a miniature of the Twin Towers, carry
the names of the New York Fire Department, Police Officers and Port Authority officials who
died in the Twin Towers. This memorial is set in a specially prepared plot of native oak trees.
In his sound portraiture and composition, Tom Lawrence thoughtfully evokes the horrors of
the events with low crackles and groans, along with the persistent winds, which bring to
mind the sheer horror of ‘9-11’ and the state of numbness we were shaken into that day and
in the times that followed.
Scene Three: At the ten minute point, water, the universal cleanser, washes in, as rain,
soothing the windburn and virtual dust of the previous section. A gentle forest rain soon
builds into a thick and determined rainfall. Tom notes that there was extensive flooding. This
gorgeous recording has a ceiling of outdoor nighttime atmosphere, whereas right in front of us
is a near field stereo perspective of rain falling very near the microphones, with wind
breathing in and out as the walls. This is another meditation that sets us up for the 'Forest
Harmonics' section, the fourth.
Here, a tone insinuates itself, pushing aside the rain, and is echoed by other tones,
resonations of chimes. A bird chirps, a small gasoline engine revs, the tones form a chorus, a
bee goes by, and the smelly stutter of a chain saw entwine. In this midwinter night’s dream,
we are in repose where the I Ching of nature and mankind in it is being cast. We achieve a
kind of sacred state until the deftly inserted Doppler serenade of passing traffic enters the
sound picture. This reminds us that this forest glen is funded by a logging company and
bounded by the outside motorized world and the clockwork of piston engines. Tom refers to
this section as 'Forest Harmonics', and says it's “sampled forest chimes, forestry felling, and
the 'carbon chorus' [surrounding motorway]”.
This five minute movement ends with a sweet transition to the last (fifth) section, a full ten
glorious minutes of the dawn chorus recorded on May 20, 2008 - National Dawn Chorus Day -
starting at 4:30 a.m. The thick, delicious swirl of birds seems to have been recorded inside the
castle ruin on the site, so an echoey density is afforded the birds, and the - speaking of
carbon - large airliner that flies over six minutes into the section. (Perhaps the birds are
excited by this jet? Dreaming of their own high flight getaway? Perhaps we are reminded
that we hear joy in their singing, whatever it means to them. As Donald Kroodsma writes in
'The Singing Life of Birds', “Somewhere, always, the sun is rising, and somewhere, always, the
birds are singing. As spring and summer oscillate….so too does this singing planet pour forth
song, like a giant player piano, as it has now for the 150 Million years since the first birds
appeared. Ten thousand species strong, their voices and styles are as diverse as they are
delightful.” [The Singing Life of Birds, Houghton Mifflin, 2005]
Set into this very long time frame, we continue to enjoy the morning (mourning) doves and
other birds. Just near the end, a witty crow character returns to punctuate a la Puck, and
after thirty minutes, a gentle fade out delivers us: refreshed and somehow wordlessly
informed and renewed by a lovely sound setting and its respectful and artful representation by
a talented composer and sound gathering artist.
John Coutanche audio creator and educator, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada
Aifric (TG4)
'Aifric is an absolute cracker' Emmanuel Kehoe (The Sunday Business Post)
'A clever soundtrack'... Arminta Wallace (The Irish Times)
How the Irish Have Sex (TV3)
“How the Irish Have Sex, a six-part series, is frank, funny and fascinating, and wears its social
history lightly. There's a sprinkling of narration from actor Bosco Hogan, but primarily this is
simply people of all ages talking about their sexual experiences, and it's compelling”
Pat Stacey, Evening Herald
"A demure programme in which people of varying ages and libido function reflect with
intelligence and gentle humour on their sex lives"
Liam Fay, The Sunday Times
"Cumulatively, with programmes looking at sex education, monogamy and 21st Century-sex,
How the Irish have Sex may add up to a worthwhile sociological document"
Hilary Fannin, The Irish Times
"It was quite a thoughtful, unsensational programme about Irish people's sexual experiences"
Patrick Freyne, The Sunday Tribune
"A tribute to the empathy of the unseen and unheard interviewer. There were no agendas and
the tone was neither sniggering, nor judgemental"
John Boland, The Irish independent
Only Fools Buy Horses (RTE1)
'A decadent delight'… (Sunday Independent)
'The action moves along at a fairly zippy pace, ensuring that it keeps the attention of even the
type of viewer who can't tell a horse's arse from it's fetlock'.
(The Sunday Tribune)
'The odds are stacked in favour of this show being a winner' (TV Now)
'Traverse - the bargain basement buy - has really captured the public imagination' (The Star)
Mebollix (RTE2)
'An Irish film dealing with a man's fear of his impending vasectomy, is something to behold.
You want comedy? Put three guys in a pub and have them talk about the old snip, snip. GOLD
Jerry GOLD'. (Ken Hunt, Worldwide Film Festival, Toronto)
The Fund (RTE1)
'Tom's music for The Fund, was so integral to it.....we had a vague idea of the general tone of
what we wanted musically, but Tom gave us exactly what was needed. It was like he'd watched
the show before it had even been made!'
PAUL STEVENSON DIRECTOR RTE
Secret Sights (RTE1)
'Secret Sights covered over a thousand years of Irish history. Tom's music brought that epic
quality to the series. His music was invaluable for adding the drama to the dramatic
reconstructions.'
MARIE TOFT SERIES PRODUCER RTE
Carte de Visite (Animation Film)
'I found Tom very obliging and accommodating. He built his composition with the narrative in
mind, greatly helping the storytelling in the film. Our film 'Carte de Visite' is so much richer
because of his involvement'.
PAUL O'FLANAGAN DIRECTOR BOULDER MEDIA
'Whether it's the effects for a title sequence, glossy fluff for a
glossy-fluff commercial, an emotive theme for a documentary or the score for a full series, Tom
will always come up with the goods - with a gem or two thrown in for good effect. His open
mind and musical versatility are without doubt his biggest assets - I'd be lost without him'.
MARTIN DANNEELS RED PEPPER PRODUCTIONS
'A confession: I've put Tom's music on a cd for car trips. This music is wide, deep and
wonderful. I haven't found a landscape or streetscape yet that it doesn't improve. Even the
'commercial' tracks. Dang, this guy is good. I'm recommending Tom to every
producer I know'.
JOHN COUTANCHE Sound Designer / Editor / Educator
Dignified Kings play chess on fine green silk (Installation-Karl Grimes))
On Killed Striking: 'a compelling and haunting series of installations'
Rosita Bolland (The Irish Times)