Sign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and other people too)

An engaged post-human episode today, flowing naturally from our recent cross-species collaborations with Elo Masing and her avian friends, ‘Kakaduu,’ in Berlin.
These explorations have deepened our sensitivity to the beings around us—how long we have lived in the dark! They’ve awakened us to the possibilities of direct engagement through sound, without words, with the non-human world.

For many years, I noticed how the cats sharing my space would puzzle over and engage with the unfamiliar tones and resonances produced during sonic experimentation. At first, I assumed I was simply anthropomorphizing their analytical poses. I ignored, or found it amusing, when they dashed into another room in response to changing sounds, whether from my work or live broadcasts on Resonance FM (yes, Bermuda Triangle Test Transmissions, it was you). But through our work with Elo, we’ve started taking a more direct and sensitive approach, creating compositions with this potential dialogue in mind.

Today, I present a new piece, Sign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and Other People Too)—a composition made with all of this in mind.

Below, you’ll also find a brief history of my personal journey into sound without instrumentation, tracing back to my time as a live sound engineer in collaboration with Alan Vega (of Suicide) and others many years ago.

We start the program with the sublime Leo Ferré and his song “L’étoile A Pleuré Rose,” from his album Verlaine et Rimbaud.

Released in 1964, this album is a profound musical homage to the poetry of Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. The magnificent Ferré, a revered French singer, composer, and poet, skillfully sets the evocative and often tumultuous verses of these two iconic poets to music, blending his own lush, melancholic, and passionate style with their rich, symbolic imagery. The album is celebrated for its deep emotional resonance and Ferré’s ability to capture the essence of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s work, making their 19th-century poetry so truly accessible and relevant to contemporary audiences.

Using a digital delay, I then capture and freeze the powerful final extended vocal note from Ferré’s wife and frequent collaborator, Marie Christine Ferré, and go on to build an improvised, “performed” composition using a range of digital effects and processes without any further added analogue audio.

This technique grew from my early live sound engineering work, where my enthusiasm for ‘playing’ sounds would perhaps sometimes cross an unspoken boundary between the musicians and the live ‘producer.’ Most directly, this was evident when touring with Alan Vega

in the early eighties on a European tour without his other half of Suicide, Martin Rev, using instead some session musicians and an ancient drum machine which replaced the proposed live drummer at the last minute as before they left New York.

Vega’s performances were truly something else, more a series of confrontations with the audience than a set list of Vega entertaining them. He would strut the stage apparently lost in his own psychodrama, taunting the crowd by viciously beating his own face with the microphone, his rapid fire vocals almost muttered as if in conversation with himself, with only his frequent screams and yelps being truly directed outwards, which I would capture within a tape loop fed back into infinity against the visceral low end industrial beats of the most basic of drum machines (rock, pop, and bossanova being the only flavours).

There was a keyboard player, a guitarist, and bass player too I think? yet it always felt like a solo show, Alan Vega and his

until one night somewhere in Sweden (I think?), as Vega left the stage he flipped the controls on the drum machine to a full manic speed, which I then captured using a digital delay, and started feeding the sound back and forth between various effects, sweeping the sound dub style from left to right long after the band and Vega had left the stage.

I was so engaged in the process that I had not really noticed they had gone until I glanced up and saw Vega watching the audience (and me) from the wings and grooving on the sound I was creating. The audience continued dancing until I eventually faded the sound out, at which point the house exploded into applause and calls for encore.

Years later, I again saw Vega live in London, and was pleased to see this had become a formal, if perhaps sanitised part of his live set, and this week with Sign Waves for Cats and Dogs (and other people too), we explore that idea a little further……… which I hope you enjoy listening to just as much as I did making it.