Audio Works
Raise the Alarm is a deep listening and deep viewing programme of screen-based and audio works from interdisciplinary artists who make art in response to the natural world and the climate emergency.
Working score for Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland. Image courtesy of Susan Stenger.
Susan Stenger
Susan Stenger’s work Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland has been experienced as an installation, book and audio recording (CD) and is based on a cross-section diagram of coastal geological formations from the River Tyne to the Scottish border, drawn by the local mining engineer Nicolas Wood in 1838. Using the diagram as a graphic score, Stenger transformed the geologic into the sonic in a 59-minute work that travels from the coal seams of Tyneside to the porphyritic rocks north of the Tweed, layering instrumental sounds, melodic patterns and signature rhythms extracted from traditional Northumbrian music and dance. Responding to history, culture and place names as well as the drawing’s structures, she combines surface detail of fiddle and Northumbrian smallpipe patterns with deep shifting seams of brass band harmonies, voice, Border and Highland pipes to create a unique portrait of place.
View Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland the programme
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop still. Image courtesy of Alaya Ang.
Alaya Ang, Hussein Mitha and Cindy Islam
Plotting (Against) The Garden is an intimate, critical and poetic sound installation around the politics of gardens, dream gardens, and the intersection between the garden and the city. The work brings together memories and stories by artists Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha, with the compositions evoking embodied knowledge, ecological grief, and anti-colonial uprising, as well as the ambivalence of the garden as a form that keeps out as much as it lets in. The work emerges in dream-form through the urban structure of Beacon Tower at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and invites listeners to contemplate the politics of gardens: Who owns the land? Who toils on it? Who does the garden exclude? How can we imagine a return to the land, to the commons, to a collective shared world beyond imperialist plunder and capitalist exploitation? Sound artist Cindy Islam has tenderly constructed the music and sounds, reactivating the seed-dreams laid to rest in gardens across cities and sites of ecological destruction. The ambisonic soundscape generates loops and layers of frequencies, field recordings and noise, morphing sound as texture, to develop an acoustic collage that facilitates a deepened listening practice.
View Plotting (Against) the Garden in the programme
Listen to Plotting (Against) the Garden, here.
Breathing Space artwork by Linda Kent, graphic design by Ashley Simonetto. Image courtesy of Genevieve Lacey.
Genevieve Lacey
Commissioned by the National Museum of Australia for their Garden of Australian Dreams, the permanent sound installation Breathing Space is envisaged as a rewilding in sound. Emerging from years of walking and listening to the staggering sound library of the natural world, particularly during Melbourne’s long Covid lockdowns, when human din gave way to the acoustic detail of the living realm that surrounds us, Breathing Space is an oasis of quiet reverberations, revealing the calls, tremulations and deep stirrings of country. The composition is vast — in response to the epic continent of Australia, and compromises multiple musical pieces of different durations, all orbiting one another at different rates, re-aligning only once a year. It summons the miraculous and precious biological and human diversity of the ancient Australian land, and is a gently, constantly shifting sound world, inviting listeners to explore its many seasons. This deep listening experience will be a 64-minute audio evocation of the long form sound installation at the National Museum of Australia.
We are grateful to ABC Classics for permission to transmit Breathing Space as part of Raise the Alarm.
View Breathing Space in the programme
Listen to Breathing Space, here.
Outside Senate House Library, London for A Thousand Words for Weather. Image by Francesco Russo.
Claudia Molitor and Jessica J Lee
Marking a unique collaboration between Artangel and Senate House Library at the University of London, A Thousand Words for Weather, is an audio experience that probes the connection between the environment, language, sound and silence. Born out of a collaboration between writer Jessica J Lee and seven other London-based poets of different mother-tongues (Arabic, Bengali, English, German, French, Mandarin, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu), the final work incorporated multilingual words for weather and contributed to a unique weather ‘dictionary’, which generated a shared language describing our collective experience of climate and the changing environment, while exploring the nuance of meaning in translating and describing our multilingual realities. These words became part of a long form sound work created by Claudia Molitor which was integrated with a bespoke playback system designed by software architect Peter Chilvers that input data from the Met Office, enabling the sound to be altered depending on the weather outside.