Tickertape Productions · Vondelpark Beats I’ve just spent a week dog sitting in Amsterdam, by the Vondelpark. I love listening to cities – it’s why I developed The London Ear – and it was wonderful to absorb a completely different city soundscape. As I took the dogs on their walks I enjoyed how we synched […]
If 2020 was all about lockdown and fear, then 2021 for me was all about release and hope. Of course, the pandemic is not over yet and controls may be needed for years. But with vaccines available (here in the UK, at least), it was a year when we could cautiously re-enter the world and […]
The City of London was a strange place to visit during lockdown. With offices, shops and bars all shut, an eerie quiet replaced the usual intense mix of traffic, building works, amplified music and – my favourite sound – bell ringing. I made these recordings at the City of London’s Festival of Bells 2021 because […]
I spent the weekend thinking about the value in the unwanted. Yesterday I went on a foraging course at Horsenden Hill where my eyes were opened (and my palette introduced) to the delights of edible ‘weeds’; weeds being plants in the wrong place. Today I took a fabulous group round Mudchute, Millwall and Greenwich on A Rubbish […]
Tickertape Productions · Trafalgar Square skateboarders, rush hour 16 April 2021 London has been – and sounded – so very different under lockdown. I made this recording on a Friday afternoon reccie just as the restrictions were beginning to ease. It’s of Trafalgar Square – a tourist hotspot on a major traffic route through the […]
I was thrilled that a recording I made last September of St Paul’s Cathedral’s bells was shortlisted for Sound of the Year 2020! It’s a newly launched ‘celebration of everyday sound (not music) in all its forms’, presented by the Museum of Sound in partnership with The New BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I spotted the awards […]
Last September I made a recording of six of St Paul’s Cathedral bells quietly chiming for the 11.30am Eucharist service. It’s a startlingly different sound to the usually exuberant Sunday ringing of twelve bells; and a direct sonic consequence of the coronavirus restrictions. I thought it would be interesting to enter the recording for the […]
What a year so far! Lockdown, of course, put a stop to our walks. It also completely changed Central London. Things that we would usually marvel at – the noise and pace of the West End, the bizarre theatre of hearings in the Royal Courts of Justice, bells ringing out across the City – ceased. And core […]
Bern Cathedral bell ringing on a Saturday Listen on radio aporee Recording by Felix Blume, 24.02.19 Dotmaker Tours has now gone global! Well, perhaps not global, but I did just have a thrilling long weekend in Switzerland with postgrad students at the University of Bern. I was there to lead a soundwalk and give a classroom presentation […]
It was a real treat to launch our new tour Trinity Buoy Wharf and Secrets of the Docks with this lovely group of families last Saturday. It’s a walk that explores the twists and turns of the Thames round North Greenwich peninsula, and the ebbs and flows of water, people and industry. The group photo was […]
