Parking Non-Stop

PARKING NON-STOP is a psychogeographical experiment in combining soundscape and field recordings with spoken word and music.

In recent years the core members of the collective have built up a body of work that explores the sonic geography of a wider Europe within the context of north Wales, which is where they live. The main focus of this work is a series of musical pieces that integrate field recordings they have made in various European locations with recordings made in their own home studios. These pieces generally combine an experimental soundscape approach with an aesthetic that veers unpredictably between europop and industrial minimalism.

Another aim is to achieve a distinctive north Wales sound that is based in the present: this is not a musical identity built from a mythical past, but an engagement with the sonic possibilities of the mines, quarries and rusting machinery in the landscape as it is today - a decaying rural-industrial environment rich with unexpected noise.

Primarily, this is a recording project. Parking Non-Stop play live only at carefully-chosen venues, often in collaboration with like-minded musicians, poets and artists. Recent performances have taken place in Wales, England, Ireland, Slovakia, Bosnia, Germany and France.

Danube in flood, Budapest 18th August 2002

"This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until there has been real, practical experimentation with possible patterns of behaviour in towns designed solely to this end: towns which, apart from a few buildings strictly necessary for some degree of comfort and security, would consist of buildings highly charged with emotionally evocative power, buildings one can feel, symbolical buildings representing desires, powers, events from the past, the present and the future. A rational extension of traditional religious experience, of myths, of fairy tales and, above all, of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent every day...as every reason for falling in love disappears. Everyone will live in their own cathedral. There will be rooms awakening more vivid fantasies than any drug. There will be houses where it will be impossible not to fall in love. Other houses will prove irresistibly attractive to the benighted traveller..."

Gilles Ivain: Internationale Situationniste no.1 1958