August 18 witnessed a cloudy Friday afternoon in Bristol, England, with a few scattered showers in the forecast. Safe from the elements, Phil Vickery, who’s hosting his show In Tune, heard weekly on community radio station BCfm, can barely contain his excitement about the next release he’s about to play.
“I’m really looking forward to this one,” says Vickery. “It’s absolutely gorgeous, I can tell you.”
And with a push of a button, the piece, “Just A Second,” made its world debut, a kaleidoscope of sound that includes a piano loop, gongs, monk chants, a chopped up dance piece, a wind tunnel, a stereo bounce of a man screaming, and much more.
Meanwhile, back in Edmonton, a few enterprising individuals are still rubbing their eyes at 6 a.m. to hear the broadcast with vested interest. After all, some of them took part in the Just A Second digital compilation project by responding to a July call-out for one second of music, sound or noise. Sixty artists from 14 countries obliged with a variety of sonic sources, which were then mixed, altered, stretched and looped to create a composition clocking in at more than 16 minutes. More than a quarter of them were from Edmonton, where the project originated and released in August as a free download on the locally based Bandcamp label Sudden Moment Recordings.
“I thought taking part would be a lot of fun, and was more challenging than I anticipated,” says Edmonton folk musician and social activist Paula Kirman, who contributed a quick guitar strum for the endeavour. “A lot of thought went into that one second, plus the technical aspects of things.”
“As a sound contributor, I never imagined that 60 one-second individual and diverse sounds looped, layered and fused together could create an international collaboration so full of woven depth and texture that the original time constraint becomes completely irrelevant,” adds filmmaker Christine Miller, who submitted a file of croaking frogs she recorded one night near her abode on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia.
Other contributors, like sound artist James Shearman in London, England, were far less organic in creating their one-second works. “The quick cuts are the best cuts!” exclaims Shearman, whose mini-composition sounded more like a hybrid of static effects.
The Just A Second compilation demonstrates that experimentation continues to be a worldwide music curiosity that’s not only growing, but also defying the stereotypes of the geographic cultures in which the artists reside. Hockey-mad Edmonton, for example, isn’t all about country and classic rock, as local participants like Melissa Goodchild, John Osborne, Babysugarbag and IVI demonstrate. Similarly, Brazilian contributors like Duodecima Hora Aedificare and Rauppuar prove that not all the folks in that nation break out the congas during Carnaval.
On this outing, artists are on equal footing with all their second-long compositions getting roughly a minute of playtime, while crossfading with other works at 15-second intervals to create a tapestry of sound. “It might sound easy to make,” says contributor Abram Hindle, “but there’s considerable engineering that goes into making it a safe and reusable and aesthetically pleasing one second.”
While some artists joined in to make themselves heard, another incentive for them was to be included in a project that reflected the community spirit of the international experimental scene.
“It’s an awesome collection of composers from around the globe,” says synth player and participant John Oparyk. “I’m proud to be a part of it!”
'Just A Second' Gets Global Attention
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