We wanted to create a work that would somehow propel the immediate and futurological aspects of life on a damaged planet. There is a sense of environmental toxicity, debris, heat and movements of the human or more-than-human.

“Every sound was produced through experimental Foley (post-production) techniques, which seemed apt given the post-natural context we were working within; we were questioning notions of authenticity and the real within the framing and capturing of place.

On New Year’s Eve of 1974/5 Stein’s 925 page novel was read aloud in a ‘marathon’ 48-hour reading at Artists Space in New York, organised by Alison Knowles, Annea Lockwood, Ruth Anderson and Jean Rigg, starting a tradition that has continued into the present. After a ‘mini-marathon’ in London last Summer as part of Longplayer Day we proposed to slow down the format and are committing to read the book over the whole of 2020, in 4-hour chunks roughly every four weeks on a weekend afternoon.
Follow the reading using this link

Dusk brings a shift of the senses, a change to how the world is known. A similar recalibration can happen when we choose to settle down somewhere and map what our perceptions find there.
A powerful inspiration derives from Hildegard Westerkamp’s pioneering approaches to soundwalking and to soundmapping and, particularly, her sustained commitment to acknowledging the complexities at work when we establish “times for heightened listening, an opportunity to connect more deeply to a place, a sonic moment or situation … to one’s own associations”.
In her compositional approaches as much as in her contributions to the methods of acoustic ecology, Westerkamp has both opened our ears to rich sonorities and located the listener as a creative contributor to encountered meaning.
After a short introduction, we will find our own time for heightened listening at the edge of the University campus, settling down together, each with a stick of chalk and blank piece of paper to document what we hear under the darkening sky, marking out a sonic sketch that could be a soundmap, a score, a diary of acoustic associations.

Durant le bombardement d’Okinawa, en 1945, les habitants ont cherché refuge dans les grottes et les champs de canne à sucre. Ils ont forgé des souvenirs qui habitent aujourd’hui les sons de ces lieux. Un paysagiste, un acousticien et un anthropologue ont travaillé ensemble pendant dix ans pour écouter, enregistrer ces sons et leur donner sens, à travers les récits d’individus qui expriment, comme tant d’autres à Okinawa, l’expérience d’une vie suspendue entre les guerres américaines, le passé, le présent et le futur.