AVAILABLE AT:

mortalitytables.bandcamp.com

Digital download only.
£4.00

(All proceeds from this release will be paid to CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably).


ABOUT THE ALBUM:

29 November 2022: Mat Smith recorded the sound of passengers chatting on a redeye flight from London’s Heathrow to Glasgow, Scotland. The conversation was dull, punctuated by coughing and laughter and was far too loud for that time in the morning. Moments after he stopped recording, the pilot announced that all passengers needed to completely power down any devices as he was going to initiate an automated landing. There was fog on the ground at Glasgow, and he advised that any devices still switched on could interfere with the landing sequence. Mat had never seen people turn off their devices so quickly. An eerie silence settled over the cabin, leaving only the throb and hum of the engines. It occurred that if we crashed, the very last things he would have heard would possibly be the inane chatter of the passengers sat around him.

30 November 2022: Mat recorded the sound of passengers chatting on an early evening flight from Edinburgh, Scotland to London’s Heathrow. The conversation was, again, nothing special, but at a volume that suggested a lack of social awareness or possibly too many beers in an airport bar. The recording was made on the approach to Heathrow. We were well below the clouds and just a few metres above the runway when the pilot aborted the landing and sharply ascended back over the airport. Mat had forgotten the reason why, but it again occurred to him that if they’d crashed, the last thing he would have heard was passengers chatting, mostly about golf and possibly trainers.

He sent the recordings, along with an explanation of what happened after each one, to Dave Clarkson who felt they were sufficiently interesting to use as the basis for a piece for the LIFEFILES series. Clarkson imagined that they were not his haphazard in-flight iPhone recordings, but audio files retrieved from an aircraft’s black box recorder.

The source sounds were burnt to a CD-R, which was distressed using a marker pen. When played, the black pen marks caused the disc to skip and stutter, yielding unpredictable noises and inchoate rhythms. Clarkson added sparse synthesiser sounds and applied the trademark approach to sound design that has characterised albums such as 'A Pocket Guide To Dream Land', 'A Pocket Guide To Wilderness' and 'A Pocket Guide To Subterrania'. Quite quickly, Clarkson realised he had the framework for more than one track, the result being the ten tracks on 'Black Box Files’, a mini-album representing Clarkson’s contribution to the LIFEFILES series.

All proceeds from this release will be paid to CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably, which Clarkson selected as the charity for this release. The original CD-R used to create the faltering source sounds is available from the Mortality Tables Bandcamp page as a unique art object, with the sale proceeds again going to CALM.

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For promo codes, downloads or more information : mortalitytables@gmail.com