Ready to Drop
created with John del Nero and Sebastian Frost
with help from Mike Furness
Produced by Artichoke
On Brighton’s promenade, a short distance to the east of the i360, there is a basketball court. When doing a recce last year on a very busy warm day we could not believe how many people were on it. They seemed to be playing several games with different teams simultaneously and also smaller games between father and son at the same time. The sound of the ball going through the basket, hitting the basket and bouncing off, the sound of footsteps running, chasing , stopping, filled us with excitement. The energy, competition, concentration, communication, joy and play was poetry in sound.
Next to the basketball court, on the beach, is a dinghy standing area. The sound of halyards and rigging moved by the wind is very evocative. It captures the adventure of sailing, sound of the sea, the hull cutting through the water. On this particular day there was no wind to excite this movement. How sad that we are missing this wonderful sound, we thought. Let’s create, let’s add to it.
So
We put up a grid of small speakers in this area. In the late evening or early morning when the court is empty, we start to play back the basketball sounds, filling the air as if the ghosts of that day were still playing. We add the sounds of the halyards and rigging. We extend the range of the sounds: on the one hand human sounds - conversations, arguments, announcements, on the other hand natural sounds – sounds of the sea that range from the gentle to the apocalyptic. We look for relationships between these two sets of sounds. This becomes more abstracted; it becomes music, music that envelopes the listeners, disorientates them, makes them (we hope) look at the landscape again.
'Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices, that if I then had waked after long sleep, will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop on me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.'
The sequence lasts for about 45 minutes, repeats, repeats, dies away, leaving only the natural soundscape.
De Nadder
Sound installation for Messums Wiltshire
in collaboration with the sound designer Alastair Goolden
Singer Melanie Pappenheim
A long empty barn.
Silence.
Sounds emerging from nothing, from nowhere. Birds, insects, water.
Gradually they begin to take shape. A river – not any old river, the River Nadder which flows past the barn.
Now the river seems to flow down the length of the barn.
Sounds of watermills, machinery.
The sounds become more musical. Voices, spoken and sung. Fragments of stories. Someone talking about fly-fishing.
The river flows through space and through time.
There is nothing in this room except a river, and the river is invisible.
The barn is full of music, and the music is gently on the move.
The music becomes choral, evoking Salisbury Cathedral, where the Nadder joins the Avon.
Distant industrial sounds. The sound of a radio, of a mobile phone.
The past and the present coexist.
The music fades away, revealing only water, insects, birds.
Silence.
A long empty barn.
The cycle begins again.
*
I have always been fascinated by taking music into the landscape. I have made many pieces in rural and urban landscapes which ask the audience to consider the relationship of music and place. These pieces generally involve many performers, some amateur, some professional.
Recently I have become interested in taking music into the landscape in more covert ways, using hidden speakers (and in one case speakers hidden in fabricated sheep), so that the music seems to emerge from the landscape.
In my home town Brighton, there is an annual festival of Open Houses where people show and sell artwork amongst everyday clutter. I have always wanted to create a totally empty Open House where the exhibits are the house itself and its sounds. (At the moment this is on the teetering pile of unrealised projects.)
Here at Messums I want to bring a river into the gallery, its sounds, its geography, its history, to make music from those sounds, to consider the flow of the river through space and through time, to create something which emerges from nothing and is constantly evolving.
*
The River Nadder, a beautiful clear calm chalk stream that snakes through beautiful Wiltshire countryside. Most people’s idea of English arcadia. Mayflies, kingfishers, herons, otters, trout.
For ever?
Maybe not.
Chalk streams are under threat.
There’s the threat of climate change, of water evaporating in the increasing heat.
There’s the threat of exploitation – of water for drinking siphoned off from the aquifers which feed the streams.
As usual it’s us.
There’s the threat of pollution – untreated sewage, run-off from roads, phosphates, fertilisers. Of algae. There are crayfish and there are other invasive species.
Chalk streams are an endangered species.
‘A nation’s culture,’ says the writer Adam Nicholson, ‘is no better than it’s rivers.’
