Coming Soon
Building Instruments - Jack Vickridge
Out February 27, 2026
The primary instrument here is an empty industrial workspace, which funnels the sounds of the outside through a process of grand refraction. The offhand trills of tiny birds are gathered and stretched into the stirrings of an imaginary orchestra, while the murmurs of distant crowds are recast as choral hums that seep out of the building’s surfaces. Contact mics are attached to the walls, floors and windows – a process through which Vickridge inverts the typical depiction of industrial spaces as sterile and insensitive, revealing them to be generously responsive to even the smallest players in their natural vicinity. The building’s handling of sound is also a perfect analogue to its primary function as a place of industry, pulling in materials from the world outside, breaking and reforming their contours, welding the disparate into strange hybrids.
Sound isn’t the only entity reformed by the space’s interior. The passing of time also undergoes its own manipulations, and we experience Building Instruments as if through the ears of a lone nocturnal inhabitant. Some events appear to be lost to phases of sleep; others are dreamt out of the dark. There are strange extrapolations of the real – soft tones dance like torchlights across the walls, while rainfall stops and starts as if controlled by a divine tap. Vickridge teases colours out of lightless corners, the imagination merging with the building’s own propensity for acoustic conjuration, with listener and space bound evermore intimately into a duet of playful and hallucinatory manufacture.
-- Jack Chuter
Coming soon!
Magneto Mori: Brussels - Mark Vernon
Out Sept 12
One way to interpret Vernon’s evocation of Brussels is as a patchwork of interdependent absences. We hear numerous spoken stories, yet none of them in full; details are lost to magnetic erasure, to the truncations of compositional editing, to the recollective limits of fallible minds. A voice hesitates as it recounts an early memory of falling. Another falters into damaged tape as it describes a trip into the forest, words sunken irretrievably under disruptive plosives. Into these gaps, Vernon pours atmospheres that perfectly render sensations of potential and inarticulability: the gurgling of water, the overlapping chatter of public spaces, amorphous suspensions of drone, all of which act like guardians to these tender zones of absent specifics.
One speaker describes their return to a familiar space as like “rewriting on the same page, and sort of erasing what I had lived there, in order to make space for new memories”. It’s therefore perfect that Vernon’s process should centre the manipulation of analogue tape: a medium synonymous with the imperfect overlay of the past upon itself, with the previous contents of overwritten cassettes forever threatening to burst through. After recording residents of Brussels describing their earliest childhood memories, Vernon intentionally distressed the tape and buried it underground for 10 days, placing it alongside magnets that damaged and part-erased the contents. These recordings were then excavated and recombined in a random sequence, with Vernon occasionally “reconstructing” damaged memories by inserting extracts from the higher-fidelity originals. Despite the hands-on nature of this process, the end result feels like a more authentic depiction of the interaction between time and human memory than if Vernon had simply allowed the untampered tape to run. The present is never an immaculate and unbroken “now”, but a nonlinear jostle of immediate sensory experience, overlain recollections and lost histories pressing in at the edges, the words scrawled over themselves until the page starts to give way.
-- Jack Chuter
About Mark Vernon:
Mark Vernon is a Glasgow based artist who explores concepts of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and nostalgia through his sound works. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the reappropriation of found recordings. A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, answer-phone messages and other lost voices often find their way into his unorthodox soundworlds. These diverse elements are distilled into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, multi-channel diffusion, fixed media and live performances.
A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he co-runs and curates Glasgow’s art radio station, Radiophrenia. He was a founding member of Glasgow’s Radio Tuesday collective and went on to set up several other RSL art radio projects in the UK including Hair Waves, Efford FM and Nowhere Island Radio. He is an award winning radio producer who has created programmes for stations including Resonance FM, VPRO, Sound Art Radio, Radio Revolten, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio Cona, Radio Picnic, Ears Have Ears, Kunstradio, Wavefarm, RADIA, EBU and the BBC.