B a c k g r o u n d
I’m working with people and places to make music for outside spaces. Reconsidering time through building non linear works that hover invisible in the air until they are triggered to play by a passing visitor.
I’m investigating this in two ways: one is for expansive ear listening and roaming, the other for full body listening and static. Both instances create audio environments away from our self-controlled solo perambulating sound spaces, the roving headphones, the self -designed portable home space transfer systems.
Both instances also put new music onto the street, away from the confines of the concert hall or gallery, away from the start finish ritual of the performance, inadvertently turning the visitor into performer and transforming the public sound space, sometimes so subtle, into patches of musical vitality. Was last night so good or was that really a trumpet gliding by?
Let’s re-work spatial considerations, exploring maps as musical scores and mapping as shifting structures moving in networked layers. Hook fragments of pieces onto them and use invisible connection possibilities to start and stop and recombine the sounds afresh, depending on where you, the listener, goes.
Roaming listening uses the street, the maps, your routes as scores, with the listener carrying the music through neighbourhoods on an audio bicycle. I first researched this idea using FM transmission with Radio Cycle (2003).
Then developed a satellite linked system for the first Folkestone Triennial (2008), with the The Marvelo Project.
The full body static listening I’m exploring through collective research project Music for bodies; making architectural music that is felt as it moves through you via Sonic Beds and Sonic Benches, the map of your resting body becoming the score.
Make music that tells of peoples thoughts and their places, attach these pieces in sonic fragments to a map of digits, then travel. You’ll be able to hear the work unfold locative. Unfurl, leap out, reveal itself in fragments and phrases and silence and noise and threads of melody as you go. Sounds collide at the corner and switch, no end, bang into another libretto as left you go instead. Hark how fresh and varied the sonic landscape becomes, how you tune into those details near and far. We have invaded and transform it.
Why pedal on two wheels? The bike carries the hardware leaving you to float around listening , and yes you are not internet connected.