four walks around a year: spring

four walks around a year: spring
Gruenrekorder | GrDl 128/13

Stepping into dawn

The four winnall moors soundwalks will be slow released during 2013 on the German field-recording and sound art label Gruenrekorder Digital. Such a durational release of the soundwalks is not only sympathetic to the prolonged meander of composition, but also physically and poetically laces the sounds (like a tape player or pair of shoes) through the celestial calendar, unspooling the walks into the seasons of another year.
The spring walk is appropriately the first installment of the four, each acoustic perambulation released in sync with the season of composition. Re-composed from recordings made through March, April, May and June, the spring walk begins at dawn with the first isolated notes of birdsong and my own frosted footsteps upon a boardwalk over the reed beds. The birdsong builds in volume and complexity as several dawns combine to reveal a polyphonic chorus, surrounding the listener in territories of song. The company of my own footsteps lead the listener into an emerging landscape, simultaneously reminding them that another was present here and that this dawn is now passed.

Herd of tadpoles

When composing the walk I did not feel it important that the coordinates of the soundwalk be arranged in strict correspondence to the fixed geography of the moors: that is, I did not attempt to map precisely and chronologically a fixed circumnavigate movement through the landscape. I preferred to let the sounds organise their own path, although by chance the location of the dawn chorus, with which the walk opens, corresponds almost exactly to location of the creaking pagoda, with which it concludes. This suggestion of circular transit is echoed in the flight path of a bank of swans that are heard arriving and evaporating, before returning only once more to disappear. At the finale of the walk a bouquet of warblers, having returned here from Africa, throw their songs of DNA into the air, whilst a work party sinks a wooden post into the ground and a mobile phone adds a digital phrase to this chorus of territorial voices. The vibrations of human toil are telegraphed down a wire fence, surrounding the moors in one more acoustic circumference as the pagoda adagio closes in.

A bouquet of warblers, with wire and pagoda.

sound descriptors: a list of sounds as they appear on the spring walk
Crackling hesitant steps, a pause, a bird singing, another song, and another, brittle steps on the wire covering a boardwalk, a dawn chorus, geese fly past, another dawn, a green woodpecker, dismantling the ringing nets, a bird hanging in a cotton bag, ringing, a call of distress, release, feathers against cotton, dismantling the ringing nets, a stream, a kick sample, rolling the river bed, trickle of water, foot steps on gravel, river hatch, a girl screams, preening swans, pond dipping, nets dripping, pagoda bending, pond effervescing, a herd of tadpoles, a cuckoo, post hole pincers, shovel of earth, sinking post, swans circling, sedge warbling, swans returning, reed warbling, a creaking pagoda adagio.

Four walks around a year: spring | Gruenrekorder | GrDl 128/13

Available here: Gruenrekorder Digital

Walking on air: summer broadcast

The completed summer soundwalk, one of the four walks around a year in winnall moors, will be broadcast by Radeq Radio, in residence at the SoundFjord Gallery, London. The full twenty-five minute summer circuit of the moors is scheduled for broadcast at 02:00pm on Tuesday 28/08/12.
The walk is aired as part of The summer of 2012, on London’s short-term online radio experiment, Radeq (radeq.vacau.com), broadcasting a continuous stream of sun/summer of ’12 themed sonic material, performed live or prepared, beginning at sunrise (06:06 UK GMT) on Monday 27th August and continuing until sunset (19:48 UK GMT) on Friday 31st August: ‘120 hours of non-stop audio from sun-lit land.’ The curators Clair Urbahn & James Dunn state:

From sunrise: You’ll hear the sounds of a microphone placed outside Cafe OTO in Dalston, London – live until midday.
At sunset: We switch over to a microphone placed in None Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand – live until we switch back to London’s sunrise , at Cafe OTO.
Up to 30 different shows are scheduled to take place from midday ’til sunset during the 120 hour sun salute, most of which will be coming live from SoundFjord Gallery, where Radeq is currently taking residence. Highlights in the programme include live improvised sounds (Daichi Yochikawa, Seymour Wright, Paul Abbott), sun stimulated sounds from Portland Oregon, live recordings and interviews with The Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen, archival audio from ResonanceFM and the FMA, underwater recordings from Canada, performance spoken word, summer field recordings, and a live ‘Two Organs’ performance (John Chantler & Carina Thoren).

The soundwalk around summer in winnall moors includes the sounds of:
dawn on summer solstice/walking on boardwalk/grasshopper warbler/barn doors/rain from barn gutter/replacing fences/buzzards/cutting reeds/rain on barbed wire/rain dripping from trees/rain on river/mini-stream/pondweed photosynthesis/water boatman/forest of tree creaks/cluster of grasshoppers/bee proboscis/wasps mandibles/path strimming/ice cream van/cows chewing/evening bell practice at Winchester Cathedral/mini-stream/river medley/evening cloud of Pipistrelles.

This is the first time that the full summer perambulation has been available to hear. For twenty-five minutes, anyone can walk around the summer moors, anywhere.

Listen: here

World Listening Day: “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.”

a walk through winter: 25:00

“Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.”
(Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room)

Wednesday the 18^th July 2012 will be the third World Listening Day. Organised by The World Listening Project, the day takes place on the birthday of R. Murray-Schafer, the Canadian composer whose soundscape project led to the development of acoustic ecology and soundscape studies. The intention of the day is to foreground the sonic environment, shifting our attention to the sounds, which make up our everyday environment and: ‘to celebrate different ways we can focus on our soundscape’.
On this day events are organised at a public and/or private level, to give individual or shared attention to the activity of listening. Soundwalks are just one of the ways that organisations and individuals have chosen to celebrate the day. Walking and listening are sympathetic modes of transport that both place us within a landscape or environment. The philosopher Edmund Husserl ‘described walking as the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world’. The body and the sensations experienced through it, provide sides, distance, closeness and place to the space surrounding us, thereby diffusing the edges between our physical self and the landscape we inhabit.
In transporting us through a landscape, walking creates another innate relationship with the sensuous terrain of the environment, shifting weight and adjusting gait to create an immediate choreography in concert with the landscape. Walking also offers a method of encounter or composition, which privileges the unconsidered, values ‘casual contacts and facilitates contemplation.’ This encounter also uncovers the temporality of a landscape, as ‘the continuous “here” of the body ‘moves towards and through the various “theres.”’
In suggesting that ‘the treasures of the past environment pour into the living occasions […] of place and regions’, the philosopher A. N. Whitehead acknowledges that our present environment is to some extent informed by our previous environments: the physical and temporal ‘“there” ingresses into “here,” and vice versa.’
Listening to the winnall moors sound walks, we hear the absence and presence of somewhere and somewhen else. However, I am not intending to recreate a solid there (and then), but rather to shift attention to the moment as it appears here.  In their ideal ‘setting’ the walks are considered a form of audio guide (whispered Ariel like into the ear via headphones), enabling the listener to walk around the moors in the acoustic company of a previous season. Whilst the sounds of the present environment are welcome to spill into the previous and mingle, creating a unique temporal landscape that maintains sensuous notions of spatiality whilst ‘presencing’ itself immediately here, there and then.

Listening lets be, lets come into presence the unbidden giving of sound. In listening humankind belongs within the event. And as a presence, the sound is that which endures, which is brought to pass, the sound whiles away in the temporal presencing which is essential to it.’ Don Ihde (1976).

It would seem appropriate, that the winnall moors sound walk project should celebrate and contribute to a worldwide day of listening. So here I share in full, the last of the four walks through a year in winnall moors.  That these final steps should circuit through winter, unintentionally leads me back to when I made my first recordings for the project in January 2010. Winter is where and when I feel the annual of soundscapes begins: as an edition of two CD’s the first, pair’s winter with spring and the second summer with autumn.  Each soundwalk is twenty-five minutes long; the time it takes to walk one full rotation of the reserve.
The anonymous voices that introduce winter, provide an anecdotal entrance to the moors. They accompany the listener into an empty landscape that lingers between presence and absence. These spoken memories disperse the borders of the moors out into the wider landscape, placing them within the cultural and personal histories of Winchester: then and there in free association with here and now. The oscillation of presence and substance suggested by the fragile disembodied voices, casts a pall of impermanence over the moors.  This transience enters into the very substance of the landscape: that which once flowed now solidifies, that which was then solid now melts or exchanges the concrete for the vaporous.
The air crystallizes underfoot, whilst ice traps the presence and absence of animals, which once walked on water. The soundscape creaks, crackles and fizzes in onomatopoeic exchange, the weight of my movement through the landscape, prefaced by the stressed tensile groans and clicks of boardwalks and the intermittent alarm of a solitary crow.
A sample of chalk taken from the bed of the River Itchen, adds to the harmony of quiet transubstantiation as ancient CO₂ is released from the plates or bones of creatures that lived beneath millions of years of shallow warm seas: oceans that once existed where now this river flows.

There is something intrinsically melancholic in all of the sound walks and in particular the insubstantial quiet of the winter walk. Perhaps it is the lack of significant presence which seems to make nothing tangible or perhaps it is the audible loss of time that colours the sounds and reminds me (at least) what once was and now is no more. Or perhaps it is more personal, winter being the final walk, the ‘end’ of the project. As I listen I remember my presence but hear my absence. Through the act of recording I have surreptitiously traced my movement through and from the landscape: I have become a ghost listening to myself now no longer here.

Remembering movement: time and place thickened

Autumn walk: sharp oblongs of reverberation

As summer begins to amble through spring, the remaining sonic perambulations of autumn and winter within the moors are completed.
The recordings from which autumn is composed are now over a year old: the sonic remains of forgotten weather and belated days. It is always very difficult to know what sounds to include and which to leave out, especially when, as an artist working with sound I am interested in the distinct and sensuous qualities of all sounds, the abstract or concrete elements of each sonic detail. I am also interested in not only the sounds inhabiting the landscape, but also the changes and behaviours of that environment and therefore the acoustic ecology and temporality of the soundscape heard. The notion of a sound walk introduces momentum, a sense of movement and therefore narrative into the soundcape: the rhythm and succession of sounds leads the ear through place and time. Even though the seasonality of the sounds creates a palette from which the walk is composed, the strict chronology of the recordings is not allowed to determine direction or progress through the landscape: place and time are allowed to meander and mingle. The hours of walking and listening are reassembled to create a walk that never took place, a remembering movement through the sounds of a forgotten landscape. The narrative structure evolves as a non-linear movement, time and place are allowed to merge and coalesce, generating a temporal spatiality informed perhaps by that soporific listlessness which inhabits the films of Andre Tarkovsky. The sharp edit of a gate latch lifted, harshly attaches one place to another, opening and closing distance, whilst moving the listener through a permeable landscape. Slow cross fades suggest a somnambulant narrative of transition; place and time thicken as they emerge slowly within each other. This aural thickening of time and place is similar to that of the olfactory experience. In the aromatic world of the Rhinoceros this is how experience happens. With a nasal membrane the size of a human brain:

[the Rhinoceros] inhabits a universe of gradual cross-fades as other creatures fade into or out of his olfactory world. The slice of ‘present’ between past and future, which we, privileging vision over all other senses, experience as razor-thin…is for the rhino a thick juicy slab of time…’ Michael Bywater, Lost Worlds

The word ‘walking’ shares its origins in such thickening: a walker being ‘one who fulls or thickens cloth’ (Chambers Dictionary of Etymology). The composition of each sound walk also evolves through a thickening process in which each previous walk informs the content and direction of the present. Landmarks and reoccurring elements emerge, but all with a seasonal shadow. The sound of water, which flows through all the walks, changes from season to season. There is a particularity to the acoustics of autumnal water, which makes it distinct from the river and rainfall of summer. This particularity is present, not only the timpani of rainfall on dry leaves, but also perhaps in the discrete contrast of wetness seeping through the crackle of frost and drying reed-beds.
The emptiness of the autumn soundscape is palpable, especially when preceded by the fecund chorus of spring and summer. A vacant spatiality is revealed, a pallid landscape punctuated by small sonic details. Sound is intermittent, a foggy silence interrupted with the occasional Hammer Horror squeal of a water rail or the viscose chaff and spatial rent of a runner approaching and departing.
Autumn seems suited to survey and repair.  A lack of procreation means that breeding animals are less likely to be disturbed and the environment can be assessed: The water vole population is at its highest and the small mammal survey is less likely to harm pregnant females. This survey introduces it’s own percussive spatiality, as the traps, laid with seeds, fly larvae and straw, offer up sharp oblongs of reverberation.

Autumn walk:  air caught in a net of wire

Autumn walk: water sounds and river sculpture

The labour of repair introduces it’s own abstract qualities, extending an otherness to the spatiality and temporality of the world apprehended.
In reforming the riverbed, using shingle to improve the subaquatic landscape for breeding trout, we hear the acoustic sculpture of form and substance: a rock thrown into the river, hollows out a sudden wet baseline; the cascade of shingle provides a curtain of damp percussion, whilst the gargling diesel engine of a tractor, retreats and disappears into silence.
Emergencies repairs to a collapsed hatch, which takes water from the River Itchen into the mini-stream and out across the reed-beds, result in a temporary interruption to the soundscape. The paths are closed with wire fences placed across the boardwalk and path at the rugby-field bridge. An area of sound is temporarily shut, but by attaching contact microphones to these fences we are allowed audible access to the Musique concrète of air caught in a net of wire and the echoing gait of people walking over the bridge. Into the moors and these dark reverberations, drift the public address of Bonfire Night and the invisible static constellations of fireworks: a tiny big bang of acoustic space and an annual soundmark of autumn in the soundscape of winnall moors.

A field of summer: ghosts of sounds now no longer here

sound walk through summer (edit): sounds now no longer here

sound walk through summer (edit): the teeth of a grass cutter hover over summer’s path

The sound walk through summer in the moors is now complete. Opening with dawn of summer solstice in 2010, the walk accompanies the listener over the reed beds and out into the working landscape of the northern moors. Through this acoustic trespass, admittance is provided to an area of the moors, normally off limits to even the most robustly booted public foot. In this farmed landscape, volunteers meet under the shelter of a barns corrugated roof, whilst outside rain pours down from blocked gutters. The sound (or noise if you prefer) of work is an inherent part of the moors soundscape: this is a maintained environment and has been so for hundreds of years.  The spatial percussion of hammers arriving simultaneously distant and close, as clips are driven into wooden posts, opens up a sound field, which remains in perpetual flux. It is perhaps fittingly ironic that the sound of people fencing in space, should conjure up notions of place as emergent and impermanent:  ‘Acoustic space has no favoured focus. It’s a sphere without fixed boundaries, a space made by the thing itself, not space containing the thing. It’s not pictorial space, boxed-in, but dynamic, always in flux, creating its own dimensions moment by moment’ (Edmund Carpenter, Eskimo. 1959). In the sonic landscape, things that are there are always close to not being there, disappearance is a constant companion to audition. For this reason, I sometimes feel the word soundscape, with its allusion to landscape, introduces a sense of the concrete and fixed where there is none. I think the word sound field may be a more appropriate term, introducing as it does, a fuzzy edged notion of place, which remains adequately open and unfixed. According to my beloved Chambers Dictionary of Etymology the word ‘field’ is developed from the Old English folde, and the Old Saxon folda, meaning ‘earth, land’ therefore relating to the substance of place rather than its edges. Other dictionaries reference ‘open land’; place that is boundless and unfilled; although there is later reference to field as ‘a parcel of land marked off and used for pasture or tillage’. If we consider other notions of field we find: the ‘electromagnetic field’; the ‘field of gravity’, and Mark Rothko’s colour field paintings. For these fields edges are blurred and substance appears vague and immersive. Is this not like our experience of the acoustic world surrounding us: edgeless and immersive with an un-favoured focus? Walking through this summer field, there are sounds that appear to disappear and return, whilst others are lost to any coming summer.

The intermittent and abrasive electrical static of grasshoppers produce points and clusters of noise, like pins on an empty map. This noise will fade with autumn, but reappear next year. A tree branch split and fallen over a wooden fence however, introduces a transient creak, which was there last summer, but, with the removal of the branch, has now disappeared completely from the present field of sound. The use of contact microphones not only uncovers the field beneath the threshold of audition, allowing us to hear the insides of trees or the delicate gnaw of wasp mandibles on a wooden fence, it also brings into presence the ghost of sounds now no longer here.

In a perfect abrasive counterpoint to the electrical static of grasshoppers and gnaw of wasp mandibles, the mechanical teeth of a grass cutter also hover over summer’s path. These approaching jaws rent open the sound field. As they close in, the oily mastication is perceptibly tactile and sound brims over into touch. The summer sound walk ends with the roll of a river’s tongue and an electrical cloud* of Pipistrelles (‘cloud’ being the collective noun for bats in flight).

Walking spring over summer and winter beneath winter

Spring soundwalk: enterance into dawn

Spring soundwalk: finale and pagoda adagio

The first sound walk is now complete and will take the listener upon a twenty-five minute circumnavigation through spring in Winnall Moors. Re-composed from recordings made through two springs over the moors, the walk begins at dawn with isolated notes of birdsong and my frosted steps upon the boardwalk over reed beds. The birdsong builds in volume and complexity as several dawns combine to reveal a polyphonic chorus, surrounding the listener in territories of song. The sounds of my own steps accompany the listener, reminding you that another was present here and this dawn has now passed. It is this ability of sound to meld present and previous experience, which interests me, perhaps just as much as the quality and temporal aspect of the sounds themselves. It is intended that the listener may use the sound walk as a poetic audio guide, a sonic ghost accompanying them upon a peripatetic amble around the moors. In this way, recorded sounds will freely associate themselves with those available in the present time and place of the listener, revealing a temporal palimpsest of acoustic and visual experience. The listener can walk around the moors in the company of a previous season, the same as that now present or in contrast to it: time thickens as we walk spring over summer or winter beneath winter.  For me it is not important that the coordinates of the sound walk be strictly arranged to correspond directly to the fixed geography of the moors: that is I do not attempt to map precisely and chronologically a fixed circumnavigate movement through the moors. I prefer to let the sounds determine their own path, although by chance the location of the dawn birdsong opening the spring walk, corresponds almost exactly to location of the creaking adagio (from a HWT pagoda set up as part of the Trust’s 50th anniversary celebrations) with which it concludes.
This circular transit is echoed in a bank of swans arriving and dissolving inaudibly into the distance before returning, once more to disappear.
At the finale of the walk a bouquet of warblers, having returned here from tropical Africa, throw their songs into the air, whilst a work party, sink a post into the ground, a mobile phone adding to the chorus of territorial voices. The toil of the work party is telegraphed down a wire fence, throwing one more acoustic circumference around the moors.

As I now begin work on the summer walk, I am aware that certain sound events reoccur, so that the geography of the landscape may be tacitly disclosed within the sound walks. However, the events do not necessarily arrive at the same point in time upon each walk.  The sounds of dawn open both the summer and spring walks, revealing changes in the songs and voices present, whilst the sound of the dipping pond and mini-stream, although occurring in both walks, appear at different points along each sonic path.
In recomposing the summer walk, I have also became aware of a latent desire to use sounds, which corresponded to my idea of what sounds should be heard in each seasons: those seasonal sonic clichés which are familiar to our ears. My imagined summer was to be a dry humming soundcsape, murmuring with soporific warmth. In fact the recordings reveal summer to be stubbornly and faithfully wet: the loud timpani of rainfall on wire fences, accompanied by a softly apparent drizzle and the damp caw-caw of a solitary crow. As always sound teaches the ear to listen: ‘let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for man-made theories…’ (John Cage).

Walk out to winter: a puddle and a plastic bottle

Christmas Day 2011: A plastic bottle in a river

Christmas Day 2010: the cackle of reeds with occasional crow

Christmas Day 2011: a Christmas puddle

Up at 4:30 to walk into winter and Christmas Day on winnall moors. Last year, I was disappointed to find the traffic noise arrived well before sunrise, so this year I attempted to beat the traffic and enter the moors with night still present. The first sound I heard as I walked from the streetlight of the Durngate into the moorish darkness, was a gentle and intermittent clunk. In order to locate and amplify the sound, I swept my microphone through the landscape, like a snakes licks the air with its tongue. The clunk was found to be coming from a plastic bottle, caught in the current of a water hatch, where the river Itchen spills into a carrier. This detritus of daily life had become a chaotic percussive clock, ticking away at the precise measurement of time. I listened to this rhythm, recording it from a number of positions in order to mix the sound of the river with the escapement of the bottle. By this strangely mesmeric watch, the space between seconds could expand or decrease. Normally I find the presence of litter depressingly offensive. I complain to myself about the selfishness and inconsiderate nature of the human race, people do not appear to care about their environment or about the danger and harm they leave behind. But here I was, in the moors before dawn on Christmas Day, listening attentively to the sound of an unwrapped present: a plastic bottle in a river.

This year, Christmas day in the moors was wet and dank; pools of water rising and stretching out to submerge areas normally left dry. I remember last year the temperature was below freezing, a Celsius reflected in the crispness of the sounds recorded. In 2010 Christmas cackled with the rustle of reeds and occasional crow, the sounds available seeming sparse and distant. This year too, the echo of birdsong suggests a deserted landscape of scattered voices, but there is also a sense of dampness hanging in the air. Merging puddles of water cut off the path to the pond, which has now become a hidden place, available only to the wellington foot of the well-prepared walker. There is something about puddles that reduces me to a playful child. It is wonderful to walk through a deep puddle and hear the splash and squelch of your own footsteps, without the consequence of getting wet. I feel intrepid, as if I were conquering not only land but also the confine of my senses. I bring back these sounds like Walter Raleigh brought back potatoes and tobacco.