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 […]
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 […]
Our last walk of the year, The London Ear, will take place on Remembrance Sunday. It’s a poignant time to think about peace, silence and noise. London experienced a noisy kind of peace on Armistice Day 1918. The social reformer Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary: ‘Peace! London today is a pandemonium of noise and revelry, […]
I was thrilled that our listening walk The London Ear was the theme of last week’s Soundscapes show on BBC Radio Ulster. If you don’t know the show it’s well worth checking out. It’s an eclectic mix of great music that you probably never heard before, along with a weekly featured soundscape. This week that was […]
