Listening and walking in Ljubljana: Št 2: “brez sledi”

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An invitation to exhibit at Steklenik (http://www.steklenik.si/en/home/) resulted in a mid-November trip to Ljubljana. Steklenik, a partnership project of the Cona Institute (run by Brane Zorman and Irena Pivka; http://www.cona.si) and the University Botanic Gardens Ljubljana, is a sound gallery space, a greenhouse with an integrated 8-channel sound system.

I had been invited to install my 8-channel work No.2: “no trace”

which, in summary, presents two walks, each one upstream and downstream, along a common route, in a river; the two walks were made on the winter solstice and the spring equinox. I had been working towards preparing this for a few weeks in advance of travelling. The set up in the gallery is of four speakers along each side wall fixed to the metal ribs of the building and sitting above a waist high, one metre deep shelf that runs the length of each long side; there is a low island flower bed centrally placed on the floor and slightly closer to one end of the gallery; all surfaces are covered in plants, mainly cacti.

Whilst there were technical reasons (manageable but clunky) and practical reasons (the centre of the room was not accessible) why I wasn’t going to repeat the Cheeseburn Grange installation of an ambisonic diffusion, my overall reason was aesthetic. I wanted to produce more of a focus on the speakers, their individual outputs and the physical and conceptual distances between them.

I ended up with a composition that had a number of features:

  • the direction of flow of the river was from the entrance to the gallery towards the external doors
  • the quadrophonic winter recordings were placed in the four distant speakers
  • the quadrophonic spring recordings were placed in the four near speakers
  • bank walk and narrated river walk recordings were placed centrally
  • hydrophone recordings were placed at either end

Having adjusted the gain – a general increase of about 5dB in response to a larger space than I had been editing the composition in and a setting that meant that whilst you could hear the work as an overall composition, you would hear more detail if you more closely approached individual speakers – the work offered ideas on walking, time and distance. The impact on my walking was described in the original exhibition catalogue essay (https://martinpeccles.com/sound-works/trace-no-trace/). In terms of time and distance then a listener could listen to and move between winter and spring as they walked between the two ends of the gallery, they could listen to the turn of the year, the change of the seasons. They could hear my progress along the river and match this to their own movement around the gallery, listening to my walking a mile as they walked the floor of the gallery. However, importantly, there was no single ‘sweet spot’ within the gallery where the work could be experienced; it was designed to be experienced by moving, by walking, by replicating my actions in creating it. Thus, each listener, with their own movement and listening, co-creates their own unique experience.

The composition opening was at midday on Saturday 16th November and I did a live performance at 19:00 on Tuesday 19th November …

I had a great time in Ljubljana – walking, recording, installing and performing – many thanks to Brane and Irena who were wonderful hosts.

A Walk with Horns: “playing” the St John’s Harbour Symphony

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The St John’s Harbour Symphony (http://www.soundsymposium.com/about/harbour-symphony/) (played on 1st July this year (2019)) is a striking sonic event. A composition for ship’s horns it takes place in, and resonates around, the natural amphitheatre of St John’s Harbour, Newfoundland. In a response to the live performance I walked a route in the immediate harbour area.
As well as the pair of microphones that travelled with me on my walk, a third microphone remained on the quayside (for which my grateful thanks to Jeremy Grimshaw). Heard from the quayside, the natural bowl of the harbour produces the obvious echo of the cannon shot that are giving percussive punctuation to the horns’ drones. Although initially synchronous, as I walk away from the quayside the ‘distance between the recordings’ increases, the architecture changes, and the sounds of the symphony become more complex – less apparent in the horns, the cannon shots eventually separate into complex quadruple sounds. A Walk with Horns “plays the symphony” making audible the shifting sounds of walked streets, people, traffic and the echoing buildings of downtown St John’s.

https://martinpeccles.com/sound-works/a-walk-with-horns/ ‎

“Beàrnaraigh” – a 24h art radio show on Radiophrenia

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With the recent conclusion of the Beàrnaraigh series on Resonance EXTRA it was a pleasure to have the complete 24h version accepted for broadcast by Radiophrenia 2019 (26th May 2019  11:59 pm – 27th May 2019  11:59 pm).
Radiophrenia is a temporary art radio station – a two-week exploration into current trends in sound and transmission arts. Broadcast live from Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, the station aims to promote radio as an art form, encouraging challenging and radical new approaches to the medium. This May was its fourth year (previously in 2015, 2016 and 2017).
The ideas behind Beàrnaraigh are the same as before (in a blog post from October, below) but here the piece was an extended whole, broadcast as the final, internet only, work of the two week programme.
During the broadcast I hosted a three-hour, 8-channel surround sound version – thanks to everyone who came, it was great to see you all. If you missed any of it then it is now available on my SoundCloud account –

Búðahraun

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I start at the back of the wooden church. In the evening light, a family wanders the graveyard but at dawn I am alone. Along the narrow path the back-of-the-beach grass transitions into the ridges, fissures and clefts of the Búðahraun lava field. Marram grass yields to rock – lichen crusted, rounded with moss – a surface razed of vegetation of any meaningful height.

from across black lava
I hear fluty chatter,
song of redwings.

I step, stride, walk the path
to the solstice turn
dusk to dawn, dawn to dusk

https://martinpeccles.com/radio-works/budahraun/

A two hour radio work: Flux #2 Búðahraun

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A slightly different opportunity to broadcast work with Resonance Extra. ‘Flux’is a monthly radio show (curated by James Davoll) that explores themes of liminal space, temporality and boundaries, whether physical or theoretical. This exploration is carried out through field recording and sound design. The next show, Búðahraun, is brought to you by me (scheduled for broadcast (https://extra.resonance.fm) on Sunday January 6th2019, 16:00 – 18:00). My thanks to James and to everyone at Resonance Extra.
The ideas
The work examines distance, time, movement and place from replicated walks into the remote, coastal, Icelandic lava field of Búðahraun. I walked a ‘there-and-back’ route twice, once at dawn and once at dusk; distance is the distance of the walk, the accumulated distance of the two walks as well as the distance heard across the lava field.
As well as the elapsed time of the walks themselves, temporality is present as the time of day but also the time between the walks – the time of a day – and, as the walks took place around the summer solstice, the time of year. You also hear across time. The structure of the two recordings was the same – walk in, rest, walk out. In order to present listening across time the composition runs as follows: walk one walk-in; walk 2 rest; walk one walk-out; walk two walk-in; walk 1 rest; walk 2 walk-out. Both ‘rests’ overlap the walks at either end, so at any point in time you are listening to recordings that are presented as simultaneous but are 12 hours apart and across the piece as a whole these are two different 12-hour intervals.
Movement comes directly from my footfall, my embodied movement across the rock, but also from the comings and goings of the birds as they, and their calls, songs, and displays move over the lava field. Together these elements contribute to a sonic portrait of a place but they also create a space to allow a listener to hear a place of their own.

https://martinpeccles.com/radio-works/budahraun/

“Beàrnaraigh” – a body of work as a 24 episode art radio show

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I have a great opportunity to present a body of work as a 24 episode art radio show – “Beàrnaraigh” – starts Friday 2nd November (09.00-10.00) and runs at the same time every Friday until mid-April (https://extra.resonance.fm/series/bearnaraigh). It is broadcast by Resonance EXTRA (https://extra.resonance.fm).
You can listen live at each Friday morning or listen to an archived version on MixCloud (there’s a link on the Resonance EXTRA web page).

Beàrnaraigh is a body of work recorded in June 2018 on a small island in the Outer Hebrides.
A small island is a tangible, coherent whole. It can be walked around, much of it can be seen from a single strategic vantage point and in an archipelago, as Beàrnaraigh is, it forms one part of a larger whole. Prompted by any circumnavigation of an island being either clockwise or anti-clockwise, horology parallels emerge – the shape of the island and the shape of a clock face, the movement of hands across the face of a clock and the clockwise circumnavigating walker, archipelagos of minutes grouped into hours, themselves grouped into days … and so on … and so on …
… and so … each episode presents one of the series of the 24 hours of the day; 12 present (one or more) walks from a complete, clockwise, circumnavigation of Beàrnaraigh and 12 present the island alone. Each episode is recorded in its allocated hour. Some are in immediate succession from one hour to its next; others are a span of days away from their juxtaposed neighbour.
Beàrnaraigh offers thoughts of time and distance
time is perhaps …
the passing 60 minutes of listening
the transition from one hour to the next, sometimes sequential, as when a hand crosses a clock’s face … but sometimes not
the apparent “24 hours of a day” composed from the 20 days over which the recordings were made
then there is distance …
the distance walked in one hour
the distance within a walk across hours
the distance of a circumnavigation of the island
the distance walked …

Thanks to all at Resonance EXTRA.

My Allenbanks Renga

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Having talked about the writing process in a previous post, here is the Renga that I wrote.

The edge of autumn

Today’s truth –
the seventh month is our ninth
white river brown

grassheads dance
to a chainsaw’s tune

branches sway
trunks creak
above dropped leaves

the canopy pours green
onto the path

uphill
tripping on roots
my breathing quickens

on the gorge edge
the updraft lifts the sky

leaf needle twig
strewn stone
steps down to the pond

sedge reed and lily
the tarn lies still

light shades
from bending leaves
pollen blown as rain

a dragonfly
hunts the glade

pheasants creep away
through bracken
a plant of an earlier time

fallen trees
soften into earth

swallows skim
the edge of autumn
rain mists the meadow

around over along
the Allen sings.

A 14-verse Renga at Allen Banks,
Morralee Wood,
on 6th September 2017,
by Martin P Eccles.