"Contours" is now online

Photograph by Robin Morley

My sound piece "Contours" can now be heard online.

Commissioned for Odin's Glow, this piece was designed as a large outdoor surround sound installation. It was designed to be situated in a field bordering the village of Newton-Under-Roseberry in Cleveland.

Every evening, for three nights, it ran as an open form work that people could come into the field and experience as they wished. I fully intended for it to be heard in complete darkness, with the voices, music, effects, forming a shifting invisible framework around those who came, sounds that moved around you, or enclosed you, or seemed to come welling up from the earth itself.

The aim was to capture something of essence of heritage and ancestry through sound, to bring the landscape around to life in the darkness.

For more detail on this project, click here.

Special thanks goes to the Danish Consulate and the Danish Cultural Institute, both in Edinburgh. They gave me valuable contacts and advice which opened many useful doors.

To hear "Contours", click below or follow the links:

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And the nominees are....

During this month of Oscars and all other things competitively statuesque, news has just reached me that two arts events I have contributed works to have been shortlisted for awards.

The 'Lumiere' event in Durham, where I programmed the artwork "Crown Of Light" which we projected onto Durham Cathedral has been shortlisted for one award, and 'Odin's Glow' has been shortlisted for another.

By coincidence, my work for an online stereo version of "Contours", the surround sound work I created for Odin's Glow, is almost complete, bar the addition of one video clip and the final rendering so watch this space, its online appearance is imminent.

"Contours" - an online update

"Contours" is a soundscape piece which I created to work with surround sound. It was commissioned for the Odin's Glow event in October this year in Redcar and Cleveland.
The arts event focussed on exploring the heritage of that local area and the commissions awarded reflected this in different forms, with the installations being placed in the village of Newton-Under-Roseberry.
It was a very ambitious event, not least because rather than be city focussed, it deliberately took art into a rural area. As well as that, the large peak that forms Roseberry Topping (a modern day corruption of its original name of Odin's Burg) was dramatically lit with large moving lights of various shapes, sizes and positions.

"Contours" was placed well off the main road in a field, where people could stand within the surround sound field in almost complete darkness with the only visual stimulus being the sweeping lights on the hill before them. Out of that darkness, voices, music, poetry could be heard in flashes, opening out the landscape and bringing life to the mystical end of the sound of a culture now hard to grasp.
The music was mostly music from that period and included improvisations on the lyre by myself as well as a rendition of a medieval piece of Danish music on the bone flute. Indeed, I enjoyed this project very much as I played all the instruments that were used.

My performers were all of Scandinavian, Icelandic or English background. They provided their own response to the translations of the Poetic Edda and Beowulf that we used. Moreover, much of Edda was heard in Old Norse and Beowulf was heard in Old English. Flavours of English, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish ran throughout as the languages of those descendants.
It was fascinating to work on and a privilege to work with so many enthusiastic people who really wanted to give voice to that landscape and fuse it with the present day. We all acknowledged the shared heritage that exists on both sides of the North Sea.

To thank these people I need to mention them by name so I will be posting a full credits list for "Contours" in the very near future as well as a link to a stereo version online so that those of you that missed it can hear a little of it.