'Chasing Stars': ESA inspired space art at Blackpool Illuminations 2016

Last night (Wed 31^st August) was the press launch for a new collaborative work created between myself, Ross Ashton of The Projection Studio, and several other partners. This piece is the result of a unique international collaboration. The European Space Agency has been an invaluable partner and has provided constant support throughout the creation of the piece. British astronaut Tim Peake stars as our ‘narrator’. The music for the soundtrack is by Vangelis, from his yet-to-be-released album 'Rosetta', a generous exchange involving amazing support from Universal Music. That is a real exclusive in support of such a unique art/science project.

Another part of the team is Dr Nick Lister, astronomer and creator of the Lawrence House Astronomy and Space Science Centre who nurtured a very special aspect of the project with us – more on that later! 

To every single one of our partners above, we offer our grateful thanks for being part of this adventure. 

Here is our taster video of just a hint of what you will see if you come to Blackpool over the next two months.

‘Chasing Stars’ as a son et lumiere piece and a project has several equally important aims.

Our first aim is to combine science and art by taking the viewer on a journey through space. When we developed this idea, we knew that real life is as strange as fiction, and believe that art is just as important as science. Therefore, in this piece, we decided the journey stages would be formed from real space missions undertaken by the ESA. No fiction is stranger than fact and the truly mind-expanding concepts and details of current space exploration are comparable to the stuff of legend. 

Ross and myself absorb much of this with a great deal of wonder and respect for people who commit their lives to this work, not least those who travel and challenge the frontiers of survival in space, an environment hostile to humans. Most recently, that has included British astronaut Tim Peake. This work, right through to the scientific experiments conducted on the ISS, is undertaken on behalf of all of us.

Our piece then stands in tribute to those people and attempts to capture, through projection mapping, the sheer scale of what ESA’s work means.

The International Space Station, 2010

NASA/Crew of STS-132, Wikimedia Commons

The second aim for us was to open up space exploration to the widest possible audience. All of our collaborators were as excited about this as we are and it formed a unified intention.

We made this piece intending for it connect with everybody who sees it using the best of current 3D animation techniques and projection technology. As an historical and cultural icon, the Blackpool Illuminations form the longest running free public light show on earth and they have given us the perfect opportunity for this project to go public.  

From "100 Years of Blackpool Entertainment"

by Ross Ashton (The Projection Studio) and Karen Monid

Blackpool Illuminations 2015 and 2016

Our third aim was to open up the creative process to our future generation of scientists and astronauts. We created an engagement program, devised and co-run with another of our project partners Dr Nick Lister.

Nick runs the Lawrence House Astronomy and Space Science Centre in Blackpool, the only facility of its kind in the UK, that teaches children about astronomy and space science. He does this with a huge passion for his work and subject, regularly sending teenagers to university where they study the subject to degree level and beyond. A unique and highly valuable UK national resource that should be more widely known about and used.

The engagement program we devised involved several schools in Blackpool to generate some of the artwork for the piece and I undertook audio recordings of the children to discover their views of space and their possible futures in it. The results, as you will hear and see, were very human and moving.

Here is the latest in the Press on the piece, with more to come so watch this space! :
From ESA
From Blackpool Council

I will write more detail in a post tomorrow about more specific aspects of the above, particularly the audio side of the project.

‘Chasing Stars’ forms part of the LightPool strand of the Blackpool Illuminations for 2016, and goes live on Friday 2^nd Sept.

Glasgow's War goes live November 11th - Part Two

In my last post, I talked about the research that lies behind Glasgow's War. This post I'll cover some of the topics you can expect to hear and see in George Square this evening.

As well as Glasgow's War, we are projecting the names of all the Glaswegians who died serving in the First World War onto the Cenotaph throughout the evening.

The evening begins at 7pm with the beginning of the Cenotaph projection and the first showing of Glasgow's War. Each 27 minute performance will conclude with a lone piper in the Square, playing to commemorate all those Glaswegians who were part of that history.

The performances of Glasgow's War are every 45 minutes throughout the evening. (7pm, 7.45pm, 8.30pm, 9.15pm, 10pm, 10.45pm, 11.27pm). The projection on the Cenotaph will run continuously.

At the conclusion of the final performance just before midnight, the final name will be projected onto the Cenotaph and a bugler will play the Last Post in their memory. I hope people will be able to join us at some point during this evening.

But what is in "Glasgow's War" ?
The period 1914-1918 is a complex one, full of changes, opinions, activities and actions undertaken, battles, decisions, lives lost and people injured. Glasgow's history contains events of people of differing historical resonance. The battles of the war were fought by men from the whole of Britain, and battles such as the Somme have a national resonance.

Christmas 1914

Other wartime developments are national but have particular regional impact - the Battle of Loos is one with particular importance for Scotland, the formation and service of the Scottish Women's Hospital is another. Other national events have an additional local resonance for Glasgow in particular. The sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, considered a national event, has a particular resonance for Glasgow then with the men at the John Brown shipyard who would have remembered building her with their own hands.

The Rent Strikes in 'Glasgow's War'

There are people who were enormously important to the city of Glasgow itself - names such as Mary Barbour, John Maclean, James Maxton are prominent for their particular areas of social activism during the First World War.

The piece seeks to provide a chronological overview of what Glasgow and the Glaswegian people would have known and saw as a city by taking you into their world through their own words. You will hear first hand accounts from soldiers of important battles such as Mons (1914), Neuve Chapelle and Loos (1915) and the Somme (1916) we hear views and opinions from local media. The account of the Battle of Jutland (1916) is drawn from the Glasgow Herald, which also acted as a first hand witness to events such as the arrival of the Belgian refugees in autumn 1914 & the rent strike protests of 1915.
You will hear from speeches and private letters by John Maclean and James Maxton to allow them to say why they took the stance they did.

The shell crisis impacted Glasgow as the call went out for women to go to work and the Royal Technical College (now Strathclyde University) trained women munitions workers. Mary Barbour sought to aid those hit by rent rises the influx of workers into the city generated. The city, already involved in building battleships, would go on to be part of the research, development & building of military aeroplanes and tanks.
Also mentioned in the piece is founding of Erskine Hospital, funded by enormously generous donations  in order to provide some kind of support and rehabilitation of injured Scottish soldiers. It was a unique relationship between the surgeon Sir William Macewen and the designers and labourers at Yarrow's shipyard that developed the Erskine limb.

The Royal Flying Corps

Sir David Henderson was a key force within the Royal Flying Corps and directly involved with the creation of the RAF on 1st April 1918.

Of special note to me, and I hope to others, is that some of the material I have included has actually come directly from original documents and required transcription.
Adverts focussing on typical summer activities of the Glasgow Fair just before war broke out is one.
James Maxton's letters was another item I transcribed from.
One account is an extract of being wounded during the Mesopotamian campaign in 1917. I have transcribed this by hand from a fragile notebook belonging to a Private who was in the Highland Light Infantry. It was originally a puzzle (the catalogue dates and dates in the notebook didn't match) so I sat with it for many hours to decipher the very faded handwriting in order to understand what he went through, and I share what I found here in this piece. This is particularly precious highly personal material and you hear it in this piece for the first time, read by one of my volunteers (thank you to Calum Stewart). It is my intention to transcribe as much of this book as possible and give the transcription to the RHF archive.

It is my sincere hope that people will come away wanting to know more about this history, wanting to explore it through their local archives. There is much digitised material online where you can find out more detail about the events and people who speak in the piece.
I can point you to the First World War Glasgow website as a starting place.

We look forward to seeing you in George Square this evening.

Glasgow's War goes live November 11th - Part One

Memorial image from Glasgow's War

Glasgow's War is a large scale son et lumiere commission from Glasgow City Council. Ross Ashton of The Projection Studio and myself have created this 27 minute long historical based work to commemorate the city of Glasgow and her citizens involvement in the First World War.

I thought I'd take this first opportunity to talk about the research process and the support we have received in creating the sound for it.

It has been several months in the making. Research has been intense and I spent a great deal of time in a number of archives in the city: the City Life archives at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow University and Strathclyde University archives have been enormously supportive as well as the archives for the Highland Light Infantry, housed at the Royal Highland Fusiliers Museum and the archives for The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) held by South Lanarkshire Council at Hamilton.

Women munition workers in Glasgow

It became clear the Glaswegians of the time left so much material that the city should tell its own story. Everything you hear has been taken from documents of the time and read by one of 12 volunteers, all of whom are Glaswegian, to form the sound. 

Each volunteer has their own personal story that has brought them to this project. From being vitally interested in the City's history, through to being blood descendants of men who served in the war itself, their enthusiasm and willingness to dive into this history with me was a moving experience.

From a sound perspective, I have used a number of different pieces of popular music, taken from gramophone transfers. Music hall culture in particular was a lively one. The music here doesn't just supply a background but forms part of the voices telling this story. Lyrics in many songs reveal attitudes of the time and a study of the most famous songs through to lesser known songs reveals a journey of changing attitudes from 1910-1919.

One inclusion I'm delighted to have included a recording of Harry Lauder raising money for injured Scottish soldiers in 1917, a rare spoken recording of probably Scotland's most famous music hall star. 

Where at all possible, I have scoured documents for any descriptions of music and sound of the time. This has heavily informed some parts of the piece, such as the recreation of the march back to the barracks in Maryhill in 1914 on the outbreak of war (I'm enormously grateful to the National Youth Pipe Band's pipe major Ross for playing the Black Bear for me). Other points of interest were descriptions of the sounds of the rent strike protests in the city centre.

Probably the most special of the reconstructions is that of the battle of the Somme. The Digital Design Studio in Glasgow, part of the Glasgow School of Art, have very generously allowed me to use part of their researched historical reconstruction of the first day of that battle as part of the piece. They have my grateful thanks for their generous contribution to this project.

I shall write more about the piece itself later.

Glasgow's War will be shown in George Square every 45 minutes from 7pm on November 11th this week.

"Parts Unknown" Gets New Interest As Sir John Franklin's ship is found

In June this year, Ross Ashton and myself gave the first showing of a new work "Parts Unknown", about Victorian views of Arctic exploration and the fated voyage of Sir John Franklin in 1845 to discover the North West Passage.
Yesterday announcements were made that one of the two ships, either the HMS Erebus or the HMS Terror, has just been discovered:
The Guardian's article today and The BBC news item

It seems a timely moment then to talk a little about "Parts Unknown".

Commissioned by East Lindsey District Council for the SO2014 Festival, "Parts Unknown" was a new style of work for us within the son et lumiere genre.
Arctic exploration in popular Victorian culture was both romantic and heroic. We explored magic lantern slide shows which were created to show 'typical' Arctic scenes to a curious British public. Working with the Magic Lantern Society, Ross constructed a sequence of slides and movements from privately held collections, which included images of Franklin.
The arctic soundscapes are a blend of electronic and found sounds. I looked at numerous musical options to try and capture something of what could be the lost folk song melodies about the disappearance of Sit John Franklin. Therefore, the visual elements deliberately emulate a magic lantern show and to balance this, folk song, poetry and the strange foreign arctic world, with all its dangers are heard in the sound.

It can be seen and heard in archival video here:

'Parts Unknown' - The Voyage of Sir John Franklin from Ross Ashton on Vimeo.


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'Triquetra' and 'Contours' feature in a new BBC film online

You may remember that last year, when I was making Triquetra, that I met Dr Eleanor Barraclough and became involved in contributing audio from Triquetra for a short piece on 'Nightwaves' on Radio 3, (starting at 22:45) looking at the power of Old Norse and Old English as languages.
Eleanor's work is part of the New Generation Thinkers program at the BBC.

I was delighted to be asked to contribute sound to another piece by Eleanor, this time focussing on the difference between the facts and fiction about the Vikings. The differences between myth and reality are quite marked in some areas. Extracts from 'Triquetra' and 'Contours' are both heard in this film. (click on the links to see/hear the pieces online).



In addition, right now there is a unique exhibition on the Vikings at the British Museum too, so it couldn't be a better time to dig deep into one of my favourite subjects.

An interview with Musey online

It's been an interesting 2014 so far!

Musey is a Harvard University startup. They have developed an app that can be found here.
The idea of the app is to let you know where to find art and artists outside traditional venues and institutions. It benefits artists & those who wish to see art or attend alternative events, providing a usable digital platform for them to find each other.

Judy Sue Fulton, one of Musey's dedicated co-founders and a graduate of Harvard University, kindly asked me if I would be happy to be interviewed for their blog. The results of our conversations over Skype and the Atlantic Ocean can be heard here.
The posts also contain some behind-the-scenes pictures of 'Rose' from the Illuminating York Festival in 2010 as well as some written info on how a piece like 'Crown of Light', for the Durham Lumiere Festival last year, was approached technically.

A Triquetra Conversation

Ross and I had a conversation with a couple of people in a windy Eye Of York about 'Triquetra'.
That conversation, recorded by Nathan Johnston, can be heard here now in all its ad hoc glory!

A Guide to 'Triquetra': 2. The Jelling Dynasty

Harald Bluetooth (King of Denmark 958-986, King of Norway 970-986)

Harald Bluetooth began ruling Denmark in 958AD & left the Danes a notable legacy. Whilst he did not get to England, he laid the foundations for his son to do so by consolidating and reinforcing Denmark as a single entity.
His achievements in this area form the core of his story and some of this is now key archaeology in Denmark.

The Jelling Rune Stones

One of the Jelling Stones in Denmark is a carved stone monument he erected in memory of his parents, which relates not just where and from whom he comes from personally but announces how he was the king to make the Danes Christian.
The 'Heimskringla', another important document once again penned by Snorri Sturluson, says the same thing. The Heimskringla is a series of sagas of Norwegian kings that takes other notable neighbouring kings into its annals.

The Kringla Leaf - c.1260

We spent a great deal of time with this document, working with several sagas for all three of our Danish kings.
Neil Oliver recently emphasised in his historical work on the Vikings that becoming Christian was highly politically advantageous, offering a certain amount of protection from Christian neighbours. Whether Harald was truly converted remains open to question, though he did build a church at Jelling.

Harald was also practical king, shoring up the land defences, or the Danavirke (Dane-work) against outside invaders. This extensive series of ditches still remain in parts of Denmark and were reinforced further during later eras.

We are told Sweyn Forkbeard, his son, decided he wanted something to rule over & requested to have part of Denmark for his own. Harald was going to keep his kingdom in one piece, no matter what.
Thus came Harald's downfall. Not taking "no" for an answer, Sweyn gathered forces to attack his own father, Harald was wounded and died. Sweyn took over the whole kingdom of Denmark & Norway in 986AD.

Sweyn Forkbeard (King of Denmark 986-1014, King of Norway 986-995, 999-1014)

Sweyn goes raiding, choosing England as a target. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us Sweyn raided for a considerable number of years. In Triquetra, there are extracts from the highly vivid descriptions of battle from the heroic Old English poem 'The Battle of Maldon', that actually took place in 991 in Essex.

Sweyn last came to England in 1013, 1000 years ago. The people, presumably ground down by raiding, accepted him as king.

Sweyn Forkbeard Coin

On Christmas Day 1013, Sweyn was officially declared King Of England, as well as already being King elsewhere. He didn't last long, about 5 weeks or so. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle states he died around Feb 3rd 1014. His remains rested in York for a while before being transferred back to Denmark. Having achieved his prize he didn't live long enough to really enjoy it or leave any lasting personal influence.

With this irony came, for me, a little Anglo-Saxon philosophy. Life, they believed, was on loan, nothing lasts forever. Death awaits us all. Triquetra sums this up prior to Sweyn's demise in a passage from Beowulf to convey this attitude of the times.

A page of Beowulf from the British Library

Cnut The Great (King of England 1016-1035, King of Denmark 1018-1035, King of Norway 1028-1035)

Cnut became King of England eventually in 1016, after re-conquering England as Aethelred had returned to England when Sweyn died.

Cnut's ruling style was somewhat different to his predecessors. In order to be accepted by the English people, he chose to be like them. He supported the Christian church, spent money and made a very public show of paying due respect. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle dutifully records this activity. He transferred the bones of St Alphege, the Anglo-Saxon archbishop of Canterbury killed by vikings in 1012, to Canterbury. He paid for new bells at Winchester Cathedral.

Cnut gives a cross to Hyde Abbey

In 1020, he wrote a ground-breaking letter now preserved in the York Gospels, declaring the kind of Christian king he intends to be and how he believes his people should also behave. This letter is not written in Latin, the language of the church and scholars, but in Old English, the language of the people.
By now, he was king of England, Denmark, Norway and had parts of Sweden and Scotland also. Where Gorm the Old started with little, Cnut had the North Sea Empire to rule.
As a powerful Christian figure he could attend important European functions, such as the crowning of Conrad II as the new Holy Roman Emperor.

In 1035, after 20 years of a highly successful reign, Cnut died and was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where his remains still rest today.

A Guide to 'Triquetra' - 1. Creating The World

The best stories start with "once upon a time" and this is no different.
Once upon a time, there was nothing, so says the Prose Edda, before it begins to describe the creation of the world, from the meeting of the realms of Fire and Ice and how that created the germs of Life in water droplets through to the fallen giant Ymer giving his very flesh and bones to the creation of the material world. If that wasn't enough, Othin casts down the Midgard serpent Jormungand, that gigantic offspring of Loki, into the ocean around Midgard, surrounding this new earthly creation by biting his own tail.

18th Century title page for the Prose Edda

This story, written down in the 13th century, is believed to have strong roots back into earlier older stories, passed via oral traditions, from the pre-Christian period of Scandinavian history.
For us, and for Triquetra, we wish to charter the story arc of the change from paganism to Christianity and so found this a natural starting point. Such dramatic storytelling from the quill of the 12th-13th century skald Snorri Sturluson also finds a natural mirror in the interpretation of meteorological and cosmic phenomena of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The Chronicle is a determined attempt to document the history of the English people. Begun in the late 9th century during the reign of Alfred the Great, himself a champion of the ideals of literacy and the spreading & storing of knowledge, it was maintained long after his passing and contains a detailed and colourful interpretation of the perceived ill omens & final devastating effects of the first viking raid on Lindisfarne in 793 AD.

Lindisfarne Abbey today

This is the first point England really felt viking presence and raiding activity and as such, we felt it worth drawing real life and myth together, the fiery dragons in the sky and the dragon headed ships coming from overseas.

To get a good detailed idea & explanation of the sheer power of the Old Norse language here as well as the Old English counterpart, I recommend this recent BBC Radio 3 broadcast on 'Nightwaves'. This short piece (starting at 22:45) features extracts from the Triquetra sound piece alongside Dr Eleanor Barraclough's excellent piece on the sound of spoken Norse and Old English word, how colourful and descriptive they are, hinting at what makes them compelling for so many people.

Triquetra at the Illuminating York Festival

Triquetra: The Shield Wall

Ross Ashton (of The Projection Studio) and myself were delighted to have won a commission from the Illuminating York Festival this year to bring the early medieval period of Scandinavian & English history to life.
For followers of my blog and my work, you will know that this is not unfamiliar territory for me - 'Contours', a quadrophonic sound installation focusses on the sounds of the languages of Old Norse, Old English and their modern descendants in Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, English and Icelandic. It also worked specifically with the poetry of the Poetic Edda and Beowulf to construct a sonic atmosphere that worked with the roots of skaldic storytelling and ritual. The aim was to focus on the father of the Norse gods, Othin/Odin as the generator of myth, story & tradition through a digital oral tradition.

Triquetra takes a different view. This time we position ourselves firmly in history to look at the fascinating story of Harald Bluetooth, Sweyn Forkbeard & Canute the Great, the three kings of the Jelling dynasty who oversaw enormous political and religious change amongst the lands that connect to the North Sea.
I decided from the outset to return to the original languages of Old Norse and Old English and I feel enormously privileged to have been supported by volunteer academics and students from a number of universities, who really wanted to support this project. The knowledge base this country holds of this material is rather humbling and worthy of mention, so my thanks go to the universities of Aberystwyth, Cambridge, Sheffield, Warwick and York for being the home and teaching centres for such an amazing period of literature and history. Named thanks will come to those individuals later!

I decided to let the texts themselves tell the story and when you listen you're as likely to hear history chronicles as well as poetry, not to mention some solid sagas from Iceland. It took 6 months of research and reading to select the parts that referred to the story specifically, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as passages which capture something of the attitude and philosophy of both the vikings and the Anglo-Saxons they set out to plunder and rule over!
I was able to build on the knowledge base I had built through 'Contours' and take it out even further. The sharp-eared amongst you will also hear me re-visit certain fragments of early music that were heard in Contours, re-arranged and placed into a new context within this piece.

The audio experience, I hope, is a rich one.
The visual experience is a striking one and already many images of the projection are circulating through all forms of media.

I finish this post with some links to some of those images and articles before I present you with my online guide to Triquetra & its history for the curious!

I do hope those who are able to come to York over the next four days will be able to experience this piece which is very special to both Ross and myself.

Triquetra projected onto Clifford's Tower.

Written article on some background to how Triquetra came to be

PDF brochure of Illuminating York 2013

Illuminating York website

To see more pictures, go here for Ross' photostream of The Projection Studio works.

You can follow me on Twitter for updates using the button in the sidebar.
You can also follow Ross Ashton on Twitter by searching for @projstudio

It's Because I'm A Londoner: Olympic Projections on Parliament -1948

This post is a long time in coming but I feel the timing is right. As Olympic fever has now settled in 2013, we are perhaps in a better frame of mind to listen to this period of history with more clarity and given the current economic situation, more poignancy.
If you recall, last year I spoke about the process through which I created the 1908 section of the London Olympics son et lumiere on the Houses of Parliament.
Part of that piece, created in collaboration with The Projection Studio, was also dedicated to the 1948 Olympics and it is this that I wish to start covering here.
The 1948 section and other related recordings I recreated are indicative of the power of the audio archive, and it is to archives and archivists everywhere that I dedicate this post.

Clement Attlee with future voters, from Sunday Times article

1948 felt like another world after studying 1908. Unlike 1908, more original audio material existed and tracking this down and hearing it formed a core part of my research. 1948 falls into an era before television was embraced by the majority of the population, when cinema newsreel was a key source of news, where radio brought entertainment, music and the opportunity to hear the voice of royalty or of the Prime Minister. We had gained access as a population to the voices of well known figures.

Against our modern daily diet of soundbites and spin, the Home Service broadcast by the Prime Minister Clement Attlee offers a distinct contrast (see bottom of post for link).
He speaks with a certain honesty, the truth about the nation having little to give at that time, about the difficult ravages of war but spoken by someone who had been there experiencing it along with everybody else. And yet with all that, also spoke about how Britain wanted to welcome the Olympic athletes and provide them with everything they could. An enormous challenge, eloquently expressed to the nation, on the day before the Olympics began.

A decimated City of London, January 1942

kindly shared here by the Imperial War Museum

London was not given the Games in 1948 because they had money and facilities to stage the event, but because despite it all, even with rationing and after a war, they were prepared to use and give everything they did have, no matter how small. The Games were nicknamed the Austerity Games as a result. This section of the sound piece then told the story of triumphing against the odds and didn't hide the struggles involved either. It was human will that made the 1948 London Games.

I wanted to hear from those same people directly involved and so used recordings from various sources: interviews with athletes, those who staged the Games, newsreel coverage, even sports commentary from one of Fanny Blankers-Koen's gold medal winning races and that wonderful radio broadcast by Clement Attlee, addressing the nation and the world beyond it.

Musically, I made a deliberate choice to underline their stories with swing music. It is a genre of music distinctly from that era - we are all familiar with its sound. But, when I considered it further, when heard beside those daily lives of difficulty and loss, I felt it revealed something of human resilience that the most popular music at that time was up tempo, up beat music to dance to.

Here is a link to the Clement Attlee Home Service broadcast:
The 1948 Radio Broadcast of Clement Attlee welcoming the athletes to Britain
To provide an wider context to his speech and the character expressed, it is worth noting that it was only 23 days before this broadcast that the NHS was founded by Attlee and his government. This move radicalised health care within the welfare state system. Coincidentally, that system is generally accepted to have begun the same year as the previous London Olympics, in 1908, with the passing of the Old Age Pensions Act under Asquith's Liberal Government.

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Digging into London: Expressing History

The news is hot at the moment with archaeological discoveries being made by the banks of the Walbrook in the City of London. I'm following it on Twitter with my curiosity piqued and my brain cells firing. Over the years, I have also read some of the more lengthy descriptions of past London digs such as No.1 Poultry, studied photographs of the bombed out City, St. Paul's standing proud, the hollow shell of St Bride's on Fleet Street and visited many times the far older walls of earlier churches revealed on the same site. History made physical is fascinating. The discovery of the history under our feet tends to be met by our population with an enduring curiosity and wonder.

To be able to work with such a subject is a humbling experience. The further away human culture can be found the more I feel we peer into it, like a mirror, wondering if that we look into that darkness for long enough something will emerge, perhaps a reflection of our own very human selves.

It seemed appropriate to me to look again at a project from 2011, one which was designed to do just that, to bridge the sounds of "now" with the sounds of "then".

The Diespeker Wharf brief was to condense everything that had ever been on one site into 5 minutes. Being London, the site has been exceptionally busy, from Romans to revolt, preaching to pleasure, inns to industry. A story of London men and women and, being by the canal, also of barges! The piece showed the cycles of building up and taking down. What stands now is what was left of its last incarnation, now converted into offices.



History is an enormous subject. It is always an educative and satisfying experience to work with it in different ways in sound, in music, in imagery, in the pieces I make.

So, here is the Diespeker Wharf Project again, recorded live. Identify the eras as they pass, history flying before your eyes.
Why does the drive of a Roman army seem to match the persistency of our drum and bass, how does the noise of industry blend with the syncopation of Latin rhythms? Perhaps we make everything after our own internal rhythms.

Ronan, a field archaeologist at the Walbrook site

image from the blog Walbrook Discovery by MOLA 

Go there to follow the progress and find out more.

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'Glass House': Enchanted Parks 2012

This winter, The Projection Studio and myself were commissioned again by NewcastleGateshead Initiative and Magnetic Events to create ‘Glass House', a new son et lumiere focussing on the work of William Wailes, a renowned Victorian stained glass artist.

Our first inspiration came from Saltwell Towers & Park, both being entirely of his own vision and design. As a successful manufacturer and artist, he designed the Towers himself to be his own home. It seemed right and appropriate to us project his own glass work back onto his house.

We hoped the view would create the effect of a lit glass lantern on the landscape. his own home bceoming an object of illumination.

'Glass House' - Wailes opens for business

Having studied the work of Pugin and the profound influence of the Gothic Revival on the design, art and architecture of the British 19^th century, I very much felt I wanted to place Wailes within the context of his time and situation, to make it clear his importance to that industry and also the place he was working in, that of the Victorian North East.

The local history of Gateshead came to the fore. 

A centre of many types of industry, it had upon its Tyneside shores warehouses that stored large quantities of chemicals, many of which formed part of the procedures for colouring glass as it was done in that era.

In 1854, Wailes was at his career peak. That same year, he began building the Towers. By coincidence, during the same year, a mill caught fire by the Tyne, the fire spread to a chemical warehouse next door. Some of the chemicals stored there were those used in glass-making as well as other industries. Sulphur was observed melting and running through the windows of the bullding, attracting many bystanders to watch the hot blue chemical glowing in the night.

Part of a moving collage of a Wailes pattern in blue

Then, the warehouse exploded.

The explosion at Hillgate decimated the industrial heart of Gateshead, throwing burning irons and timber over the town and also across the river to Newcastle, where the fire took hold and spread further.

The Great Fire of 1854 utterly destroyed the lower levels of the medieval town and streets. Its devastation though was seen both a curse & blessing, giving a starting point to build a newer centre. The Victorian ancestors of the Gateshead area became determined to regenerate the area into something better, to move residences away from dangerous industry, to make sure cholera would never return.

The processes of glassmaking follow a similar pattern, where the destructive processes of fire and chemical interaction produce something new, even beautiful. 
The Gothic Revival that Wailes’ work was part of continued apace. In the 1850s, the Victorian passion for glass had yet to be satiated. Wailes exhibited his work at the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, that world famous cast iron & plate glass structure, ironically also destroyed in fire in 1936.

Critiques and reviews of the time make it clear that those artists and designers able to draw close to the glasswork colours of their medieval counterparts were applauded. Whilst Pugin searched for the secret chemical recipe to create 'ruby' glass, the precise tint of red produced in those earlier eras, Wailes’ style was appreciated for his depth of blue and also for his particular design of patterns. Glass colours were named after jewels such as ruby, topaz and emerald green, so valued was coloured glass as a vibrant visual spectacle in both the medieval and Victorian eras.
Something similar could be said of projection today, hence our decision to use Pigi projection on this, essentially the modern equivalent of a magic lantern, projecting images from strips of film.

Wailes window showing biblical scene

The sound piece draws upon actual texts from multiple sources to run these overlapping stories in parallel. As the sulphur melts in the fire, so we see the house bathed shades and patterns of Wailes’ distinctive shade of blue. His use of red is displayed as we hear romantic descriptions of the burning of the town described in a local report. As the town shatters, an angel covers her eyes.

One lost piece of his work draws ‘Glass House’ to a close. 
Wailes was commissioned to create a memorial window for those who lost their lives in the 1854 fire for St Mary’s, the parish church of Gateshead, badly damaged by the explosion.

This window can only be pictured in the imagination, through the description of it in the piece. It was lost in 1979, in another fire, after approximately 120 years in situ.

No colour photographs of it have been discovered yet.

If you have any pictures of St Mary’s interior prior to the fire of 1979, or know someone who does, the St Mary's Heritage Centre, would dearly love any record of it, even a copy.

The Centre became the hub of Gateshead's local history once St Mary's was decommissioned after the fires.

Hopefully the story of Wailes' glass does not reach its end here.

'Glass House' is being shown as part of Enchanted Parks 2012 at Saltwell Park, Gateshead until Sunday 9th December from 4.30pm through the evening.

Many thanks to:
Shaun Thubron for his photographic work;

St. Nicholas' Cathedral, Newcastle and numerous other churches of the North East for granting us access to photograph Wailes' works in situ;

The Saltwell Park Volunteers Group for donating their time and vocal talents;

Magnetic Events and NewcastleGateshead Initiative for supporting our exploration of Gateshead's fascinating Victorian history

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‘Four Seasons’ at The Venetian Hotel

The Red Priest himself - Antonio Vivaldi

Vivaldi is one of the most famous Venetians in history. As such his work has been at the forefront of some of the material created for the Lights Of Venice project at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas.

In choosing music for the piece “Canaletto”, a very modern visual celebration of that artist’s Venetian panoramas, I favoured parts of some of my favourite Vivaldi pieces, namely his Lute and Mandolin concertos.

The Four Seasons concerti are exceptional and innovative pieces of music, not only fulfilling expected conditions of form and structure but containing the creation of poetic scenes using music to suggest changes in weather conditions, animals, people. Today these works are often taken for granted as they are so well known but his use of melody & harmony and his contribution to chamber music is unique, his skill and imagination influenced other greats such as J. S. Bach.

The Four Seasons concerti were never far from our minds though and we had discussed presenting the natural turning of the year with his music for almost a year before this year’s 'Winter In Venice' theme gave us the opportunity to do so.

The Hotel wrote a story based on some traditional Winter legends from Italy including the figure of Befana. It was decided that a character, Amadora, as a goddess figure, was going to be depicted as being responsible for moving the year from one season to the next.

We saw this as a good marriage between their story and our theme and so our latest piece 'Four Seasons' was born.

The first part is a short introduction written based on harmonies found in the Winter concerto. After this introduction, the piece moves through each season until we get to Winter once more.

In re-arranging sections of each concerto I was keen to not remove its original soundworld of strings and harpsichord altogether but to take them and weave them closely to both Vivaldi’s seasonal inspirations and our visual ideas.

For ‘Spring’, Vivaldi created passages which mimic the sound of birdsong & I decided to explore those passages more deeply, to see just how closely those phrases match with real birdsong. This followed on from the experiment with the Nuthatch as part of the ‘Yorkshire’ section of “Rose” in 2010. Vivaldi's scoring matches birdsong construction closely. In my birdsong recordings, simple birdsong patterns found identical phrases in this passage. The result for our piece is a combination of flute & pizzicato strings weaving with bird recordings, building up a back and forth conversation against a background of April garden sounds I recorded in Naples, Pompeii and Herculaneum in 2011.

For Summer, I decided to focus on the section known as the Storm. The fast passages of the lower strings reminded me of the drone of buzzing bees and further investigation showed the register of those figures and actual bee sounds occupy the same range. I found a bee recording which buzzed on the tonic and the bee’s flight through Summer, complete with dandelion collisions came to be.

Autumn has time-honoured community based traditions of harvest, wine-making, fruit-gathering, preparing for winter. It seemed appropriate then to use ‘La Caccia” from that concerto and arrange it with a folk dance feel. The harpsichord & solo violin took position as main instruments & are driven by percussion from Renaissance drum samples and tambourine.

Vivaldi’s ability to paint the sense of bare fragility and icy cold in the opening of the Winter Concerto is a wonderful piece of musical soundscaping. I decided to take his scoring and put it in the hands of glass instruments of various origins, struck and bowed, layered to build each tone and sound very carefully.

An Ondes Martenot was used very simply, to provide a careful round toned bass line before the strings joined for the climactic moment where the theme begins. This accompanied a beautiful visual sequence of the Torre dell’Orologio gradually being frozen over, layer by layer, cold colours flashing over its new glassy surface.

‘Four Seasons’ runs at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas every night throughout the 2012/13 Winter season as part of the ‘Winter In Venice’ programme.

Have A Listen...An Autumnal Special

The need to be productive has been upon me somewhat this autumn. More projects announced in due course.
In the meantime, when I can, I have been gathering together some edits and material to share with you in this blog. Many people have requested I put my work together for a website. I enjoy writing directly in this way about the things that move me, blog style, and also to put short messages into the ether via Twitter.

For those of you who are new, there are links to works online for 'Contours' on this site, played at Odin's Glow in 2009 and at Illuminating York 2011, outside York Minster.

For more long standing people, here are some edits for you to hear. All of this material hasn't been heard since it was played at the relevant arts exhibitions and events.

I know some enquiries have come in this week. Answering those, yes indeed, details about the original piece we did for the Illuminating York Festival in 2008 are available for viewing and hearing online! Parts from our archive footage for 'Accendo' have been available for viewing for some time and can be seen online here. A short explanation on the inspiration behind it can be found in the same place. The theme of the relationship between art, science and the transmission of knowledge is a fascinating one. I seized on the opportunity to work with a combination of self-written scripts and original texts by Alcuin of York. The soundscape was complex and perhaps deserving of a post in its own right.

But moving on...

ROSE - ILLUMINATING YORK 2010

I should mention that as I put the extract here, there are also some very good images to be found on my fellow creator Ross Ashton's flickr photostream here: rehearsal shots and event pictures.
If you click on the title, you'll go to pages on this blog where I spoke about it at the time.
This edit contains extracts from the sections 'Yorkshire Rose' and 'The Rose Garden' where I worked with a number of local performers, many involved in the Mystery Plays cycle, to record poetry for the piece. Early music enthusiasts present at the time may have spotted the musical motif (which returned throughout in various disguises) of the medieval carol ' 'Ther is no rose'.


VIA MARIS

This is a son et lumiere seen/heard at St Andrews Festival 2009.

The first part of the edit is from 'The Dream of St. Regulus', the second part is 'Fish Tango'.

THE CURIOSITY BOX


A little something seasonal and wintry.

I was commissioned to create a piece to accompany an interactive video snow globe created by The Projection Studio in 2008. It doesn't feature on this blog, but was destined for the award-winning Enchanted Parks 2008, along with a sound installation I created for the rose garden there, called 'All My Love'.


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UPDATE: Paralympic Projections On Houses Of Parliament returning soon!

The son et lumiere on the Houses of Parliament is on a short break right now, from Monday 3rd - Thurs day 6th September. The projections were timetabled to take a break then at the request of the Houses Of Parliament.
But we are back projecting Friday 7th, Saturday 8th and Sunday 9th September.
If you want to see this celebration of the richness of the Paralympics and hear some of our greatest GB Paralympian moments of the past come on down!

Presentations run every fifteen minutes from 8.30pm with the final show beginning at 11.45pm.

It's Because I'm A Londoner: Olympic Projections on Parliament - 1908

When The Projection Studio asked me if I wanted to be involved with the Houses Of Parliament Olympic son et lumiere, I knew that I did. I have made sound pieces for many places but none for my home city before.

The piece itself has a first section in two parts. The first part is a creative visual & sound piece centred on the 1908 London Olympics.

Original audio material from 1908 is a rather limited resource. I had to rely on other types of research material to create a section which used soundscape techniques as the principle guide. 1908 then was to have great depth of layered sound, and no part of it was anything that wouldn't have been heard in 1908, from Edwardian trams to the Thames boat sirens through to music, instruments & early 20th century amplification technology!

To add human voice to the 1908 Olympics, I tracked down Patrick Stevenson, the great-grandson of the 1908 Olympics central Toastmaster, William Knightsmith. It is Knightsmith you see in probably one of the most iconic photographs of the London 1908 Olympics, with his enormous megaphone. Knightsmith is something of a toastmaster legend, adopting the red coat to wear when working to avoid being confused with waiters. A favourite of the Royal Family, he also was toastmaster for many occasions for them. With the Olympics taking place at Shepherd’s Bush and Knightsmith living nearby he was first and most obvious choice to keep the Royal Family informed as to the stadium activities.

Knightsmith’s presence highlights a critical fact – there were no public address systems as we understand them now. White City Stadium was still a full sized stadium though, so the presence of men with megaphones were essential to convey messages and crowd announcements.

The importance of this is highlighted in a section from Conan Doyle’s report from the Marathon, another text used in this section, where he describes the audience around him only being able to identify the winning swimmers by the hoisting of the relevant national flag!

Text announcements accompanying the photographs seen in the piece came from research I carried out from the official reports of the 1908 Olympics. Patrick Stevenson recorded the announcements, playing the role of his great-grandfather for the London 2012 Olympics. This had a certain ring of appropriateness around it for all involved and I was glad that I was able to find him and learn so much more from him, so my thanks go out to him.

This article shows Knightsmith and his megaphone with Patrick.

Onto megaphones.
This is the most unique aspect of the 1908 piece and is the biggest indicator of just how different a time it was. We are used to electrical technology of every kind. Acoustic amplification is surprisingly efficient but has a sound all of its own. The sound of a large aluminium megaphone was replicated by listening, in situ, to Patrick speaking through a real, 2ft long one he owned.

I analysed those recordings carefully and found that amplification took place so efficiently that he needed to be recorded a small distance away. From there I could hear how the metal affected his voice and found the best way to create that was after recording, where I could control any resonant frequencies of the metal cone to my advantage. It took a while to get that absolutely right. When heard on the embankment, it sounded precisely as if he was announcing to the crowd there.

I mentioned Conan Doyle earlier and indeed, he has a longer standing connection to British Athletics and the Olympics than many may realise, as Peter Lovesey has made clear in this article from the Journal Of Olympic History. For the 1908 Olympics, Conan Doyle wrote an enduring piece reporting the 1908 Marathon, the most iconic event of that Olympics. 
We approached Neil Oliver to ask if he would be willing to play the part of Conan Doyle and read out the key excerpts from this piece. Conan Doyle's report is a wonderful document which describes the feeling and atmosphere of what it felt like to be there, on that day, amongst that crowd and to watch Dorando Pietri stagger across the line only to subsequently be disqualified. The British love of the underdog was very much in evidence from Conan Doyle’s report as the British loved Dorando more for trying and then losing his medal than it ever thought again of the actual winner of that race!

Neil Oliver, as an historian, archaeologist and TV presenter was excellent to work with on this piece, which is both history and written artefact. We recorded Neil speaking Conan Doyle's words and he gave it a knowledgable sincerity that gave the soundscape even more weight.

In addition, the Conan Doyle report describes more than just the race, but also other events that day. This was one of most colourful texts to read through for the detail of his descriptions but also the feeling of being in the stadium, moment by moment.

Music choice was equally fascinating and included popular music of 1908 along with pieces played at the Olympics. Again, even in the absence of any 21st century amplification, the crowd still needed to be entertained. The Victorians and Edwardians were rather musically sophisticated and the brass and military band live music phenomenon of the 19th century was also present at the 1908 Olympics too. I found a program listing the music to be performed by a military band at the occasion of the gymnastics final. One of those pieces was chosen for inclusion along with the only original related recorded material I could find, a recording of "Take Me On The Flip-Flap" sung by the music hall star Ella Retford. 
The 1908 Olympics took place within the Franco-British Exhibition. The White City Stadium was built for that purpose. The main public interest initially was in the Exhibition, not the Olympics! The song commemorates the most popular part of the exhibition, the Flip Flap, a ride not dissimilar to the London Eye in principle. 
It makes verbal reference to the Olympic athletes too in one of the written verses as well as describing the multiple ways you could get to Shepherd's Bush by public transport.
The kind permission of Windyridge Records to allow us to include their transferred Retford recording was much appreciated and very generous indeed. The preservation of very early recordings is something I am enthusiastic about and it is companies such as Windyridge that help to keep such music alive and accessible to us.

That then was 1908. 
Other parts to follow!

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