Category: Sound Archive

Sound Exhibition:

18 & 19 June 2022 Saturday & Sunday 2:30 – 6:30pm

Running Time : 8 minutes 20 seconds. Free Entry

This piece of work is one of the 5 pieces that are selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 2 – an Open Call for work that are based on field recordings.

‘Llantysilio’ explores the soundscape around the small church at Llantysilio, a community near Llangollen in North Wales. The church stands by a weir where water from the River Dee is diverted into the Llangollen Canal, which passes through the town towards the Pontcysyllte Aquaduct, a World Heritage site built by Thomas Telford from local iron. This part of north-east Wales, close to the English border, is a confluence of historical forces and natural features. The Dee, the canal, Telford’s Holyhead Road, the railway to the coast (torn up under Beeching), pass in close proximity to each other. The church at Llantysilio stands at the headwaters of this historical logistical network, but the church and its yard are quiet places of contemplation. This composition, based on field recordings at the site, uses percussive plucking of an acoustic guitar within the church and ambient sound from the churchyard to evoke the echoes of industrial history that reverberate within the Dee valley.

Sound Exhibition :

26 August 2022 Friday 5-8pm

27 & 28 August Saturday & Sunday 2:30-6:30pm

Running Time : 34 minutes. Free Entry

This is one of the four exhibitions of work and artists selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 3 – an Open Call for pieces that are based on field recordings. We are pleased that this round of the Open Call is funded by the Arts Council England and the work was jointly selected between Project DIVFUSE and sound artist and tutor Jose Macabra.

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amongst the references there are ones to borders;

between the liquid & the frozen

the solid and the porous state of walls along a cattle run

and between narrative and the shape of language as a sounding object.

‘Working on this piece, during a year where plans were constantly being shifted, created pockets of time that seemed to drift between the day-to-day and a suspended sense of progression. With A layer of liquid water (2020/21) I attempt to explore the aesthetics of certain located sounds; the memories contained in recordings from trips to Oslo and through others which reference ideas of the static and the transitory (restriction and movement). I have an interest in words as sound, with their meanings more fluid, and this became an important, refreshing element of the piece. With many thanks to Jenny Berger Myhre and Line Elkjær for their readings of the texts. ‘ – Pheobe Riley Law

Sound Exhibition :

2 September 2022 Friday 5-8pm

3 & 4 September Saturday & Sunday 2:30 – 6:30pm

Running time : 28 minutes. Free Entry

This is one of the four exhibitions of work and artists selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 3 – an Open Call for pieces that are based on field recordings. We are pleased that this round of the Open Call is funded by the Arts Council England and the work was jointly selected between Project DIVFUSE and sound artist and tutor Jose Macabra.

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Desert (2019) – from the album ’Sonance’, released on Linear Obsessional recordings

Natural radio in a desert that goes on forever
obsidian chimes under the earth
life waiting under the salt

Natural radio field recordings made in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada using a very low frequency receiver constructed by Stephen P McGreavy, and a self-created magnetic loop aerial. Additional studio recordings by Stephen Shiell: Obsidian needle chimes – mined in Nevada and well known for their musical quality.

Voice by Hannah White is inspired by the story of the fairy shrimps, whose eggs lie encased in the dry playa soil of alkali flats until the rains come, flooding the desert and prompting the eggs to hatch, grow and reproduce.

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Crummock 2019 – from the album ‘Kyem’, released on Industrial Coast

At Crummock water, in the Lake District , a contact mic receives the breeze, vibrating harp strings. Omni-directional mics filter the drone of the wind through a chimney, and a hydrophone hears rushing water and a bell, struck and submerged.

Sound Exhibition :

9 September 2022 Friday 5-8pm

10 & 11 September Saturday & Sunday 2:30-6:30pm

Running Time : 12 minutes. Free Entry

This is one of the four exhibitions of work and artists selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 3 – an Open Call for pieces that are based on field recordings. We are pleased that this round of the Open Call is funded by the Arts Council England and the work was jointly selected between Project DIVFUSE and sound artist and tutor Jose Macabra.

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Connemara Landscape (Wind Study) (2022)

Connemara Landscape uses the post-impressionist paintings of Belfast-born painter Paul Henry as a departure point for creating a ‘sonic landscape’. Focusing on the wind as its subject matter, the artwork is an attempt to collaborate with the weather, drawing on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s idea of ‘correspondences’ (where humans respond with sensitivity, care and judgement to other beings, matter and elements).

The work explores the idea of collaboration and correspondence by using a number of sound recording techniques that focus on ‘macro’ soundscapes, to ‘micro’ moments of resonance and musicality, created by objects and plants interacting with the wind. The work was created in March 2022, while on residency at Interface, Connemara, situated in the remote locale of the Inagh Valley.

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False Detection (2019–21)

False Detection is composed of sound recordings from the electromagnetic spectrum. Electromagnetic fields (EMFs) exist beyond the threshold of human perception, yet envelop the environment around us, emanating from electronic devices such as cellphone towers and WiFi transmitters. The risks of EMFs are debated amongst different communities, with research suggesting that EMFs can have detrimental effects on some forms of wildlife.

For False Detection, the artist collected a series of audio recordings of EMFs and played them to a mobile phone app called BirdNet, which uses a machine learning algorithm to identify bird sounds in the user’s surrounding environment. By iteratively manipulating the sound recordings and letting the BirdNet app listen to them, the artist was able to ‘trick’ the app into thinking that the EMF sounds being played were being made by birds residing in the local area. In this sense, the artwork exposes the hidden architectures and processes of the algorithm; making it heard.

Sound Exhibition :

16 September 2022 Friday 5-8pm [Artist will be present 5:30-7pm]

17 & 18 September Saturday & Sunday 2:30-6:30pm [Artist will be present 2:30-4:30pm both days]

Running Time : 25 minutes. Free Entry

This is one of the four exhibitions of work and artists selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 3 – an Open Call for pieces that are based on field recordings. We are pleased that this round of the Open Call is funded by the Arts Council England and the work was jointly selected between Project DIVFUSE and sound artist and tutor Jose Macabra.

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FUMP HULDER, or ‘Essence of the hidden’ (translation from the late 18th century Devonshire dialect), is a document of several days spent exploring the acoustic ecology, landscape, and geology of Permian Period Dartmoor, formed some 280 million years ago.

‘As well as (re)opening my deep-listening practice with this short study, mediated via sound and the environment; textural and elemental, it also reasserted the visual beauty without the constant reminder of humanity and its footprint.

Employing different microphones, I located and recorded the sound hidden and unavailable to the human ear. The pure sounds of flowing water beneath the surface tension, the crack and lurching of different trees, the elements on rusty barbed fences and farm gates. But not ignoring the often ignored such as the throbbing rumble of the wind canopy within huge forests and the change in acoustics and sound of areas completely hidden by morning fog.

The few film pictures taken are all closely connected to the sound experience and in particular, recordings made, so became a psycho-geographic locational pairing.’ – Martyn Riley

Martyn Riley is a London-based, Derbyshire born, Sound Artist and Experimental Musician, focusing on associations between sound, experience, memory and the physical. He employs a multitude of recording techniques utilizing new and older analogue methods of sound composition. Manipulating sonic landscapes, challenging the listeners perceptions of personal and physical environments inhabited. 

Sound Exhibition :

18 November 2022 Friday 5-8pm

19 & 20 November Saturday & Sunday 2:30 – 6:30pm. Artist will be on site between 4pm and 6:30pm on Sunday.

Running time : 13 minutes. Free Entry

This is one of the three exhibitions of work and artists selected from DIVFUSE Sound Archive No. 4 – an Open Call for pieces that are based on field recordings. We are pleased that this round of the Open Call is funded by the Arts Council England and the work was jointly selected by Project DIVFUSE and sound artist Kate Carr.

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‘I live near the New River, a man-made artficial river in North London opened in 1613 to bring drinking water into the capital. One day I decided to drop a hydrophone into the water in the hope of hearing the underwater sounds of nature, and instead was surprised to hear the sound of tube trains at great volume. It made me wonder what London might sound like from different watery locations. This led to Surfacing (2022), a collection of field recordings from London, made in the autumn of 2022. Each section of the piece consists of two recordings made at the same location, one with a hydrophone under the surface of a body of water collecting water-borne sounds, the other with a condenser microphone recording the ambient air-borne sounds. At times the two worlds appear closely connected in terms of their soundscape, and at others they appear to be worlds apart. ‘ – Rachel Musson