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Archive of experimental sounds

Here you will find sound and poetry produced by mechanical devices, saxophone and voice. These works are offered publicly without demanding interpretation, agreement or cultural allegiance. They can be ignored without consequence. The work moves through areas commonly labelled sound art, experimental music, noise, experimental poetry and installation but these are unnecessary genre categories. These sound sculptures, poems and recordings are not presented as commodities or lifestyle objects. They are not designed to optimise engagement, build a personal brand or satisfy institutional language about participation, innovation or relevance. They are just physical materials, unstable sound, damaged signals, repetition, atmosphere, mechanical tension, emotional residue. Some pieces fail completely. Some accidentally reveal something difficult to describe. This seems close enough to honesty.

Featured works

Happiness Confusion Wellbeing Excitement - a 20 minute sound poem by Hastings of Malawi operating at the boundaries between music, poetry and linguistic experiment using human edited computer generated speech, phonetic play, found sounds, and machine operations.

Duration 19:39.

The White Albums - Four extended poems by Hastings of Malawi

Body with Organ, HOM9 the Humanoid Robot that can Read Braille, Yuri's Dream and London Zoo 1939

All released on the Papal Products label. All Hastings of Malawi releases can be heard here.

Popular on YouTube this video shows "groan tubes" attached to bicycle wheels. Groan tubes are related to reed organ pipes. They are sounded by a reed which moves within a tube thus changing the pipe length and the frequency of the note produced. Other organ pipe experiments can be seen here.

Film used as the projection backdrop for a recent Hastings of Malawi performance at the Wroclaw industrial music festival in Poland.

Duration 20 minutes.

Sound painting for human voice with randomly produced sine waves. Three of the speakers are attached to a processor that generates sine waves at random intervals and of random pitch and random length. The two larger speakers play separate human voices.

Meaning Machine #2 - a sound sculpture for organ pipes and speakers that merges the manual of a church organ with light bulbs and seven organ pipes. It draws on Christian iconography, incorporating nails and the crucifix alongside parts of a traditional liturgical instrument. Three nails are driven into the keyboard, fixing down keys spaced a tritone apart, historically known as the “diabolus in musica” or “devil’s interval.” Within the body of the instrument, a fan mechanism activates the organ pipes, while an internal playback system runs two audio tracks through embedded speakers, one of which is positioned at the centre of the crucifix. Four organ stops are extended - vox humana, meaning, selfie, and truth.

A church organ dissected and its anatomy recorded. Melody, harmony, and rhythm replaced by air, vibration and resonance.

1. Recordings of individual organ pipes recombined as a digital evocation of the inside of a church. Duration 9 minutes.

2. From Windchest to Pipes as Metaphor - a microphone travels along the insides of a church organ from the windchest where the air is produced to the pipes. Duration 3 minutes

Various experiments with organ pipes made from wood, steel tubing and taken from church organs can be seen here.

When building a new supermarket in Hackney, London, Tesco Stores and Hackney Council commissioned a public sound art work as part of the development. The supermarket was built on a site where formerly there had been a street (Chalgrove Road). The work was an oral history of the missing road made from interviews with people who had lived on or near it between 1910 and 1970.