To coincide with a live performance that premiered the work on September 15th 2011 at St Mary’s Church, Windemere UK
a limited edition of 150 CD copies are now available.

‘Thought-provoking, beautifully subtle and deeply moving, this series of five compositions delicately weaves together the history of the past with the sounds of the present. Simply stunning.’ Cheryl Tipp, Wildlife Sounds Curator, British Library.

+ http://mpwright.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/where-once-we-walked-ltd-cd-available/

+ http://www.anotherspace.org.uk/a2a/

+ http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.klasztor-sieradz.pl/%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den%26prmd%3Divns&rurl=translate.google.co.uk&sl=pl&u=http://www.klasztor-sieradz.pl/zabytki_klasztoru.html

This interview is based on ideas inspired by RE:Walden, a collaboration between theatre director Jean-François Peyret, Thierry Coduys and a few others…

Le Hub would like to thank Mark warmly for the sympathy, the time and the energy he put into the construction of this interview.

Recording Where Once We Walked | Photo by Chris Atkins

Where Once We Walked | Preview Excerpts by Mark Peter Wright

1- Research VS Practice - Facts VS Imaginary - Composition VS Field Recording

AB. In a previous interview you speak about how research and practice blends in your work to become almost the same thing. This to me can be illustrated by the idea of ‘soundwalk’, a major constituent of your creative process. Soundwalking brings together ‘reading a place’ (moving innocently from one sound/view to another), ‘reading beyond the place’ (constructing a reflection and imaginary based on the landscape its rhythm, like ideas extending behind words) and ‘writing’ (by already organising sounds into a ‘narrative’: environmental composition). Do you use soundwalking as part of your process when first listening to a place or site?

MPW. I find in the beginning at least, more often than not, working and listening to a specific place is a process full of contradictions, mixed histories, myths and misinterpretation. Finding a ‘way in’ can be difficult so in this respect soundwalking is a great way of intuitively connecting all these underlying ambiguities. For me, recently at least, sitting or standing still is my initial way in. It’s almost like a kind of endurance test, to stand in one place, to listen and wait. At some point you cross a threshold without being aware of it and your completely lost – I like that area of not knowing. There’s a quote from Annie Dillard that I find useful with regard to this:

‘You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing or spread. You feel the world’s word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same’.

AB. Would you say that you construct fiction from findings (objects, photographs, sounds)? Or would you rather say that you explore sites guided by your imagination? How do facts and imaginary elements articulate in your work?

MPW. I would say that I explore specific sites with a mixture of learned history and intuitive rambling. There’s always an overlap between the two (fact/fiction) and that’s where I like my work to operate, in the overlaps.  A recent publication, Inanimate Life deals with this in some way. The sounds presented are straightforward, simple recordings of wind resonating on various materials. They are however quite microscopic, in ways we can’t really hear in everyday life, but they do exist, they’re just not in our normal range of perception. Sound has the ability to be a deeply fictitious medium; it has the uncanny ability to trick you constantly. So this blurring, between what’s real and not is really inherent in the medium – all I’m attempting to do is listen and tease it out a little.

South Gare, Redcar | a site of ongoing research.

AB. You work with sites that have often encountered some trauma, be it historical, political or ecological. What is it about these types of places that interest you?

MPW. I’m interested in how a traumatic past, present or future can impact upon a place and manifest itself now, today on a landscape – How do we begin to listen to this turbulence? How does it resonate today – politically, socially, subjectively? Fundamentally the sites I like to work with, those with loaded histories, immediately speak beyond the location itself and I’m interested in testing sounds ability to do something similar, to spill and connect beyond its form.

AB. How is your listening experience on site different from the experience you are trying to bring to your audience?

MPW. That’s an interesting one. Practically speaking working on site can be a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. There are moments of utter despair, falling over your own cables, not setting up equipment in the right way, always missing the thing that you think you heard. On the other hand you have moments that are almost transcendent, where you feel somehow a part of some inexpressible truth. I suppose out of the two I’d like to present an audience with an expression of the inexpressible – but that’s a tall order!  I’m currently working on a project commissioned by Pacitti Company called On Landgaurd Point where I’m recording within and around Landguard Fort, a grade 1 listed heritage site. I’m creating an alternative audio guide for the site so visitors will be able to roam certain parts of the Fort with a set of headphones and be immersed in both the auditory work and the physical site. For me this combination is the perfect blend of my own listening and how I’d like an audience to engage with that, the site and their own histories.

AB. What difference do you make between ‘critical listening’, ‘subjective listening’ and what could be called ‘imagined listening’?

MPW. I interviewed Hildegard Westerkamp recently for an online publication I run called Ear Room; she made a comment that really struck me. I asked her about how she navigates between the objective and subjective ear whilst recording and she said ‘I don’t believe there is such a thing as an objective ear.’ It’s such a simple statement but it’s so true. I’d say critical listening implies a broader acknowledgment beyond the scope of the ‘I’ – both are as important as each other.

Recording | Where Once we Walked

2- Retreat - Nature - Society - Observatory

AB. Henry Thoreau wanted to take a bit of distance from the city to reflect on his contemporaries, while remaining close enough in order to observe them. He would write in the woods while going to the market everyday or invite guests for dinner. A main part of your work takes place away from human activity, on a retreat, (mal de mer, a quiet reverie). How much of your work is an escape from city, contemporary times, industrial sounds, and technology?

MPW. I did it the other way around, I wanted some distance from the country so I moved to London - it’s helped my work enormously, to look at the same picture from a different angle. I certainly don’t see my work as a retreat or escape. The places I like to work with are often (not always) removed from a busy, city type environment, but for me at least they are places to confront and reflect over the human condition. I love the end scene from Pasolini’s film Theorem , you could say the character is retreating from the city but it sure doesn’t look pleasant where he’s going. It’s that expression of existential angst, that transformation and confrontation of the unknown primordial soup that lingers in us all I’m intrigued by. Far from retreating I’d say the work is really about facing all theses contemporary fears and somehow grappling with them.

AB. Do you think you can only find a sense of solitude away from the industrial/human activity of a city?

MPW. One of the most solitary listening experiences I’ve had was in London as helicopters and police sirens wailed all above me. I was sat under a pier along the Thames and the acoustic under there was so amorphous and consuming– I felt completely alone even though there were thousands of people and industrial activities all around me. Again, I think it just highlights that a lot of my work is about the condition of the human psyche as much as it is about a straightforward engagement with history, sound and place. Solitude is clearly a complex issue. In the American literary traditions you mention you see it manifest in people like Thoreau, Kerouac even through to Christopher McCandless – as much as it is about escape, they’re going to these physical and mental places to confront something. Thoreau himself puts it well by bringing to debate the bigger picture of the universe and the limits of technology…

‘This whole earth which we inhabit is but a point in space. How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments’?

AB. A project such as Vent engages with a 100% industrial sound. One may see on the one hand an ecologic action: bringing to an audience the awareness of an ‘imperialist’ sound that dominates London, squashing any other sound in its vicinity. On the other hand, you are sharing the variety and the beauty of the sound of vents and your fascination for them.

MPW. I recently gave a talk that touched upon these issues. Vent is a departure in some ways from my other works as it does involve 100% urban sound. It really came out of working with Peter Cusack on his Favourite Sounds project. I was in Manchester recording huge lists of people’s favourite sounds and it had a deep impact upon me in terms of how celebrated chaos, noise and industry were in a city. I grew up around the countryside and most probably carried with me a naïve inherent assumption that as R Murray Schafer would put it, a ‘hi-fi’ (rural) soundscape was somehow a more valid one. Obviously this is not right but it took a while for me to realise as it was in my blood from an early age. So Vent is really a way of wrestling with my own conflicts between urban and rural sound and eventually celebrating aspects within urban life that are often overlooked or under appreciated. There’s been a great amount of ventilation recordings documented by fantastic people throughout the world so I love the idea of a ‘global vent community’ combining forces to map these fantastic noise-makers.

Vent by Mark Peter Wright

AB. How much of your work consists of creating a distance, a viewpoint to look at contemporary society?

MPW. I’m very interested in playing with distance, particularly contextual distance and how much information is given to a listener other than the core piece of work. I like the idea of working within a sliding scale, between two opposite points of context and isolation – moving between the two, hovering over ambiguous territories and thresholds is an exciting place to listen. I think when you deal with the past your always dealing with a distance that naturally builds - as I’m speaking these words, we’re moving further away from where we began. How do we get back to the beginning? What’s great about recording technologies is that you have the ability to capture moments and preserve them in time. As I mentioned earlier, hopefully my work can engage with specific past histories but at the same time reflect and meditate over the hinterlands of our own psychology as well.

3- Technology - Reduction - Materials - Input - Output.

The experience of Thoreau was based on ‘reduction’: reducing his material needs to minimum to study human relation to technique. JF Peyret compares Thoreau’s wooden shed with a machine, a typewriter. Thoreau enters the shed with ideas which exit the shed in the form of sentences.

A.B.What equipment do you use? Could you create work without it? Are you an augmented listener or more the naked type?

MPW. I’m not a technical man in any way shape or form; I can’t even put a shelf up around the house without causing some lasting damage to the walls. So for me it’s always ideas and instinct first, then a process of finding the relevant technological/form based solution. More and more I’m working on projects that move away from audio recording technology to some extent. One work titled Listening Acts is a series of photographic images that document extended periods of listening. It’s about the physical ways in which we listen to the world around us and how we, and a place can impact and leave traces upon each other. Another project is called Notes on Everyday Listening – I’m looking to publish this in the next eighteen months or so. It’s an exercise in remembering sound and involves text only. So yes, reduction is very much a big part in everything I do, particularly in terms of process and getting to the end result. Ideally I want to boil research, practice, forms and technology into some fundamental experience that can be delivered in one potent message – that’s another tall order!

For more details visit Mark Peter Wright’s website: www.markpeterwright.com and Ear room: www.earroom.wordpress.com

Published and broadcast work by Mark Peter Wright: Published/Broadcast Works [Excerpts] by Mark Peter Wright

Antoine Bertin for le hub.

]]> http://www.le-hub.org/lang/en/archives/436/feed http://www.le-hub.org/lang/en/archives/398 http://www.le-hub.org/lang/en/archives/398#comments Sat, 09 Jul 2011 07:00:32 +0000 admin http://www.le-hub.org/?p=398 Mysterious watering plastic tubes grow at the foot of London trees and seem to be part of a secret underground network that connects the plants together.

In his radio piece ‘the hidden language of trees’, Gregory Whitehead imagines a conversation between a journalist and a scientist who would have found how trees communicate with each other. Listen to an extract of this beautiful piece:

the hidden language of trees

For more details, visit the IanniX website.

Thiery Coduys will perform ‘Flux’ during the ‘Désert Numérique 2011‘ festiva on Sunday the 3rd of July. Apparently, it sounds a bit like water in the desert. And also like Oasis.

Cathy Lane is an artist specialising in sound. Her work consists of composition, installation and radio pieces. Cathy recently published a book entitled Playing with words: the spoken word in artistic practice. She is the head of CRISAP (Creative Research Into Sound Art Practice).

The pickle jar is her home click here to listen

Le Hub: Today we would like to talk about the pickle Jar is her home, a composition you realised in 2009. Your piece was recorded both in Britain and India. It is made of a diversity of beautiful sounds of food being chopped, mixed and cooked as well as voices and outdoor ambiances. Could you tell us about the ideas behind the pickle jar is her home and what led you to start the project?

Cathy Lane: The starting point of the piece was to explore food as a material, as a sounding substance, and the relationship between food and sound as material to be processed and transformed. I was interested in the similarities between the way we treat food and the way we treat sound in terms of ‘cooking’ (either of them really: mixing, chopping, cutting, blending) and in terms of the spatial gestures that we use with both things.

LH: The pickle jar is her home takes the listener beyond sound and food as material, what else did you investigate through sound and food and food through sound?

CL: I started to make a lot of recordings about food: where it is sold, where it is consumed, where it is grown. But I was also very interested in individual people relationship to food. In parallel, I was making interviews about their memories of food, more precisely about the food that reminded them of their youth and the food that they like to cook.
These discussions were so interesting from a socio-economic perspective, because it says so much about the time and place where people were born and brought up: Who cooked the food? Where was it cooked? What sort of food was cooked? People can really relate to others through this kind of things. These are particular to classes, countries and ages of people.
I also got into the historical aspects of food. We are now very aware of the global politics of food, but of course food has always been central to global politics. One of the things I looked into, which comes out probably more in the book than piece is the case of pepper. Five hundred years ago, pepper was the most important thing in the whole world: the piece became also about relationships between countries and in particular between Britain and India.

LH: The project became a journey through time and place! Could you tell us more about the title: The pickle jar is her home.

CL: I started to look into how food embodies the idea of home. In the case of my friend Margie, who the piece is named after, she didn’t actually have a home (laughs). She had this very large pickle jar she had bought in a market and that she used to cart around the world with her and placed in places… As long as she had it with her, I think she felt she had her home around her. For her the jar was a symbol of home.

LH: The audio composition comes with a book. Was it a combination you envisaged since the start of the project ?

CL: It was a difficult decision. It was the first time I had done it, as I have always believed that sound should speak for itself. And I do think sound does speak for itself: it’s just that it doesn’t necessarily deliver the things you wanted to say. In this particular case, although my starting point was a simple exploration of food as a material and its relationship to sound, the minute I started researching I found that so many other things came into it. My research became wide-ranging, and I felt I wanted to include that when I presented the work.

LH: The book is not a transcription of the audio. It consists of photographs and snippets of conversations that aren’t exactly connected to the sound. What is exactly the relationship between the book and the sound?

CL: I didn’t want to make it documentary. I wanted to have an abstract approach to the facts that were informing the project. The book is made of a lot of photographs as well as little snippets of conversations. It is non-linear, but hopefully acts as a kind of ancillary, almost as an appendix to the sound piece. One of the ways the piece can be exhibited is as an installation, where you can look through the book while listening.

LH: Why was it essential for the project to involve several places: Britain and India?

CL: I don’t think it was essential to the project because it didn’t started off with that in mind. I was really lucky to be offered a chance to work in India for a little while. I had already started the project in Britain and carried it on in India, which gave it a completely different dimension. India and Britain’s history is so tied up. It can be traced and unravelled through its food. The fact for example that chicken curry, which you never find in India of course, is now supposedly Britain’s favourite food. Or that many recipes you find in India were influenced by the British time there.
These two locations also created a really good contrast. Many of the battles that have been lost in Europe between small producers and agribusiness are still very current and have just started in India. India so far has managed to very largely sidestep the globalisation of food and fast-food, and still has distinct and original cuisines. Unlike Britain I would say.

LH: In the composition some of the sounds are repeated several times consecutively, possibly evoking the idea of repetition. On the one hand, it made me think about the beauty of cooking gestures being repeated and always improved, on the other hand about the repetition of a same eating experience from one fast-food to another.

CL: One of the restaurateurs I talked to in Bangalore said how every Sunday since 1943 they had to make the same meal for lunch. They have a regular clientele, some of whom are in their 80’s and 90’s who go back because it is a recipe that isn’t really made anymore: it is a special recipe from the south of India, it takes a lot of preparation, nobody has really got time to make it at home anymore…even in India. Every Sunday people go and enjoy it! That’s a kind of positive repetition possibly.

LH: Finally, how would you describe the difference in sound between a kitchen in India and a kitchen in the UK?

CL: A lot of Indian kitchens work of bottled gas, have a marble chopping surface and aluminium pans. These three things dominate the background atmosphere. Also, there is so much more pounding in an Indian kitchen! There is certainly also more frying… Of spices such as mustard seeds that pops!

LH: And what are you cooking at the moment?

CL: I am working on a number of projects, in particular a long-term piece: which is again tracing relationships between Britain and India, this time through the Indian nurses or hires that came over to Britain with families coming back and then lodge in Hackney, while they were waiting to be employed to go back. But more immediately, I am working on an immersive sculpture/installation that will be part of the Camberwell Arts week in Brunswick Park.

Following the departure of Madeleine Aktypi last year, le hub has evolved into a new mind blooming collaboration taking off this spring. Madeleine developed le hub into an exciting reflection platform, hovering above contemporary arts and technology, hoovering up and exhaling exhilarating ideas. After three productive years of work with Thierry Coduys, and after she entirely created le hub’s website, she is en route to something new:

Flight                                from                       to                                      platform                        status

Madeleine Aktypi              Le hub                     Something new                 On-line                          En route

Antoine Bertin                   London                   Le hub                               Shoe                              Tone

Antoine Bertin has arrived at le hub. Antoine is a London-based artist and engineer specializing in sound. Through research and practice, he will put the work made at le hub in relation to the London art scene, sounding out the differences between listening to Johnny Hallyday and eating marmite on holiday.

A performance by Lucille Calmel freely adapted from ‘Close to knives: a Memoir of Disintegration’ by David Wojnarowicz

Théâtre des Tanneurs - Brussels

15th to 19th of march 2011 - 8:30pm

Direction and texts : Lucille Calmel

Performers : Sébastien Lenthéric, Mathias Varenne

Set design : Gaëtan Rusquet

Set design assistant : Octavie Piéron

Artistic director : Mathias Beyler

Head of interactivity : Thierry Coduys

Programming : Philippe Boisnard

Sound design : Jean-François Blanquet

Assistant director : Judith Ribardière

Translation : Laurence Viallet aux Editions Désordres - Le Serpent à plumes

Graphic design : Axelle Carruzzo

Photography : Sébastien Devaux

Production : Sylvia Botella