Susan Philipsz: SURROUND ME, A Song Cycle for the City of London · October 11th, 2010
“Things… made truly Musicall with Art by my correction, and yet plaine, and capable with ease, by my direction.” Composer Thomas Ravenscroft, from Deutoromelia, 1609
At the weekends an eerie quiet descends on the City of London, in offices, squares, churchyards and streets, broken by the occasional sound of traffic and church bells. The silence of the city has inspired artist Susan Philipsz’s first commission in the capital. Her unaccompanied voice resonates through empty streets around the Bank of England, across postwar walkways and medieval alleyways and along the banks of the River Thames.
SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London takes inspiration from the heightened presence of the human voice in Elizabethan London. To be heard over one another a natural order and harmony evolved in the cries of the street traders which enthused composers of popular song such as Thomas Ravenscroft to write canons where one voice follows the other in a round. Another popular song form for several voices, the madrigal emerged in Italy in the 16th Century and soon travelled to England where it flowered as the English Madrigal School.
SURROUND ME embraces the vocal traditions of the City of London connecting themes of love and loss with those of fluidity, circulation and immersion; the flood of tears, the swelling tide and the ebb and flow of the river, to convey a poignant sense of absence and loss in the contemporary City of London.
Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2010 for Lowlands, a work installed under three bridges beside the River Clyde in Glasgow. Her work is in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, 5 October 2010 – 3 January 2011.
This project is supported by Arts Council England, Special Angels and The Company of Angels.
Saturdays & Sundays only, 10am – 5pm
9 October 2010 – 2 January 2011
Change Alley / London Bridge / Mark Lane / Milk Street / Moorfields Highwalk / Tokenhouse Yard
Surround Me is an Artangel commission.
FM Radio Map (2006) – Simon Elvins · August 19th, 2010
Site-specific map plotting the location of FM commercial and pirate radio stations within London. Power lines are drawn in pencil on the back of the map which conduct the electricity from the radio to the front of poster. Placing a metal pushpin onto each station then allows us to listen to the sound broadcast live from that location.
Blind stories, blind walks: the cinema of the mind · July 13th, 2010
A couple of days ago my good friend Roberto invited me to take part in an ‘experiment’, in fact it was a sketch for a live art piece he will be presenting at the Rifrazioni Festival of Contemporary Art (Lazio, Italy), in which he and I will be participating in late July.
It was a hot summer night in Clapton. I was sat on a bench in Millfields Park, eyes closed, waiting for the moment to arrive. A presence behind me, someone walking in the grass. A blindfold on my eyes. Roberto sat next to me, opened my hands and took my keys. From now on, I could only follow him – I felt somewhat submitted, I had to listen. He was the only guide. The story he was recounting was shifting time and place: it was now winter and I was in Brooklyn.
Eyesight disabled, the first steps in the grass were a little intimidating. Because of this sensory deprivation, my way of perceiving the world had to be reconsidered, and the world itself was changed into a place full of challenges: my feet became sensors of the ground, every bump a potential hurdle, every kerb a threshold, every wall an insurmontable frontier. Despite being relatively familiar with the area we traversed, I was completely unable to tell where I was going.
Sound was the other point of reference I could rely upon, but again it was hugely transformed by the effect of the blindfold: Ambient sounds took a whole new significance; they became abstracted, almost as if they were part of a setup, akin to a film soundtrack. Street chatter and conversations strangely felt like they were ‘acted out’ by people.
This unique experience, reminiscent of a soundwalk like Subtlemob, if only better, placed me at the center of an invisible stage, where everything and everyone around me took up a new role, forcing me to focus both on my senses – to make sense of my surroundings, and on my imagination – to visually interpret the story I was listening to.
The Rifrazioni festival takes place on the 29th, 30th of July and 1st of August in Anzio e Nettuno (Italy).
Bill Fontana: River Sounding – A journey through the hidden sound worlds of the Thames · April 20th, 2010
This spring, Somerset House Trust and Sound and Music will present River Sounding, a major new commission by sound artist Bill Fontana, which will invite visitors on a journey through the hidden sound worlds of the River Thames. Opening on 15 April 2010 at Somerset House, the work will create an imaginary acoustic map of the Thames, taking visitors through Somerset House’s atmospheric subterranean spaces, normally closed to the public, and out to the Great Arch on the Embankment, highlighting the building’s historical connection to the river.
River Sounding at Somerset House features a series of different sound sequences, recorded by Bill Fontana along a one-hundred-mile section of the Thames stretching from Richmond to Southend. Projected through loudspeakers installed at river level, in the hidden pathways beneath the courtyard, visitors will be immersed in the rich musical vocabulary of the Thames, from whistling buoys and steam pumps to hidden underwater sounds and rushing water at river locks. The sounds will be played alongside his video images of the recording locations, which include Tower Bridge, HMS Belfast, the Thames Barrier and the historic Teddington Lock.
As well as revealing the rich and varied sound worlds of the Thames, River Sounding will pay homage to Somerset House’s historical connection to the river. Somerset House was originally built as a grand riverside palace in the sixteenth century and in the eighteenth century became the home of Admiral Nelson’s Navy Office, with boats entering through the building’s Great Arch. River Sounding will return the sounds of the river to Somerset House, highlighting the forgotten shared history of one of London’s most iconic buildings and the Thames.
River Sounding demonstrates the communicative power of sound art, and the commission launches Sound and Music’s new programme, dedicated to championing and developing audiences for new and innovative music and sound. It will be complemented by a series of film screenings and talks by prominent cultural figures including Iain Sinclair and Romesh Gunesekera, Writer in Residence at Somerset House, engaging with River Sounding’s themes, which will take place in and around Somerset House.
Trained as a composer, Bill Fontana (born 1947, USA) is internationally known for his pioneering works in sound, which examine the nature of our acoustic environment. He has presented his “sound sculptures” at leading museums around the world, as well as at iconic locations in many of the world’s great cities, including London’s Millennium Bridge and Big Ben, San Francisco’s Golden Gate and Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. He has received numerous fellowships for his work, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship in 1986. He lives and works in San Francisco and is represented in the UK by Haunch of Venison.
15 April – 31 May 2010
Somerset House
The Strand
London WC2R 1LA
Opening hours:
Monday – Sunday: 10:00am– 6:00pm,
Thursdays: late night opening until 8:00pm
Admission Free
‘as if it were the last time’ – a street action / soundwalk project by subtlemob · November 15th, 2009
“imagine walking through a film, but it’s happening on the streets you walk down everyday.”
‘As if it were the last time’ is a series of street actions/soundwalks which took place in London, Bristol and Liverpool on the 12th, 13th and 14th of November. After signing-up, participants were able to download one of two soundtracks and gather along a location that was kept secret up to the beginning of the event, in order to take part in an impromptu public performance. On a rainy Thursday evening, the mob started to congregate in the area around Seven Dials, and at 6pm sharp, mp3 players began to unravel their story:
As an atmospheric soundscape started to resonate in my headphones, the heavy drops of rain were giving the situation a sense of heightened drama. The first couple of words whispered in my ear coincidentally seemed to be echoing what was going on around me: someone looking over their shoulder, readjusting their coat, putting their hand in their pocket… Everything that was said seemed to predict what was going to happen, as if the street suddenly became the scene of a theater that was directly responding to the soundtrack, as if seemingly random passers-by were all part of an orchestrated setup, their choreographed moves obeying a pre-determined script.
The result of taking part in subtlemob: the schizophrenic feeling of being both a spectator and actor, an insider and an onlooker. Above all, the inexplicably intense sensation of belonging to the street, of being here and now in the city.
Sounds in spaces · November 1st, 2008
On the subject of “the ability of sound to instil even the most mundane images with beauty or new meaning” and matching mood with space, I remember visiting a show appropriately entitled “Shhh… Sounds in Spaces” at the Victoria and Albert museum back in the summer 2004.
The rather unusual aspect of this show was that the museum displays hadn’t been altered in any way; Instead, the museum-goer was given headphones connected to a player containing a set of pre-recorded tracks that was triggered as you crossed specific doorways. The portable technology used (IR sensors and a lightweight headset) was transparently integrated, giving way to the stunning experience of entering a room just to be surprised and self-conscious of our own presence and motion into the space, revealing the hidden aural dimensions of architecture. This ‘invisible exhibition’ was actually turning the experience of visiting a gallery upside-down while engaging visitors with the space in an unparalleled way: the wandering visitor was the focus-point of the art, rather than being simply an external observer of it, by creating their very own audio-cinematic display in (and from) their head as they moved along the rooms and corridors of the museum.
Ten sound artists and musicians were commissioned to create aural pieces re-defining specific rooms and spaces of the museum from their own perspective. The results encompassed a wide variety of approaches to making sound, through a game of contrasts and comparisons between sound and space: compositional, concrete, conceptual, in response either to the architecture, to the objects, to activity, or associations of meaning: from Roots Manuva’s outspoken social commentary in the Norfolk Room to Cornelius’ work which was particularly moving – It was almost as if you felt the music was a direct echo of the light twinkling on the glass and ceramics objects you were looking at.
