Wembley Eiffel Tower by Darren Hayman

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• published: 05 May 2014
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Wembley Eiffel Tower Released on Glass Reservoir 12th May 2014: http://glassreservoir.com/releases/wet/ Music Darren Hayman Words Helen Atkinson Voice Valentine Leys Sir Edward Watkin (1819--1901) was a bold innovator and entrepreneur. In addition to being a British Member of Parliament, he was also one of the first to attempt to build a channel tunnel between England and France. Sir Edward was instrumental in the birth of the Metropolitan Railway, which eventually became the Metropolitan Line on today's London Underground. When the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889, Watkin wanted to build a taller tower in Wembley Park as an attraction to draw people onto the Metropolitan line. By 1895, the tower (known as Wembley Park Tower, Watkin's Folly and other names) was completed to its first level but was soon found to be unsafe. Finance became hard to find and work was halted. 'The London Stump', as the tower also became known, remained a landmark on the London horizon until 3 years after Watkin's death when it was eventually dismantled. The concrete foundations were discovered underneath Wembley Stadium when it was demolished prior to rebuilding in 2000. The Making of Wembley Eiffel Tower The thing I like most about my Analogue Systems modular synthesizer is the different ways in which you can interface with/control it. Pitch can be controlled via external audio sources, or a joystick or a voltage control. In fact, controlling the synthesizer by a conventional keyboard is one of the trickiest and unrewarding ways to get sounds out of the machine. For this piece, I wanted the modular system to play itself. I wanted to define a set of rules between the myriad of modules, connections and knobs and let it compose tunes itself. It certainly helps that one of the modules I own is a programmable scale generator, which turns chaotic voltage signals and pulls them into conventional musical values. In this case a C-major pentatonic scale. The other unit that was useful for this piece was a clock divider. I set up an internal clock for the first pass and from that point on it was never moved. I then used the clock divider to get quarter beats and so on. The clock divider could also be used to divide up the bars and open the amplifier for short bursts of notes. No human being is playing or choosing these notes. Once set up, the modular system was left to play itself for 45 minutes. Each track was recorded onto tape cassette before being assembled inside Logic. Between the idiosyncrasies of control voltage and analogue tape I was hoping for slips in timing to grow throughout the piece. Lazy tape motors and random voltage surges caused new rhythms and arrangements to occur. One side of a tape cassette dictated the length of the piece of music. Inside the computer, I then set about editing the tracks. Long volume curves were drawn to ensure that the 45-minute piece is constantly shifting and moving. There are six tracks of music and one vocal. The reverb was provided by an EMR:11 unit made by Electro Mechanical Research and the echo itself was also recorded onto tape and then reloaded into Logic. - Darren Hayman - December 2013