Vernon, Mark: Call Back Carousel LP

Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind's eye -- projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listener's mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape-recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the '60s and '70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from Vernon's own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that he has collected over the past twenty years. Using these found slideshow commentaries as a framework, a series of musical soundscapes have been created to bring the absent images to life, activating the listeners' imagination in the classic tradition of "cinema for the ears". It's a little like looking through a family photo album where only the handwritten captions and mounting corners remain; the photographs themselves have all been removed. The evocative rattle and clack of the projector shuffles through different slides as the fragile voices of tour guides accompany you on a sonic journey that fractures time -- and through the cracks, the past bleeds through into the present.