The deserted, partly derelict factory was a space of spaces. A real structure yet intangible in its size and complexities. Although it was uninhabited, it spoke back when we made a sound. Although cold and dusty, it produced colourful and long-lasting resonances in response to our actions. Rain fell heavily through its perforated shell. It tapped, splashed, drummed and trickled in a rhythmic complexity on all the surfaces that it contacted, and when finally reaching the lowest level formed puddles, where thuds on the dust were transformed into a sensation of the weather that awaited us outside. It was littered with small metal and wood debris, hinting of its past. Each of these items presented an irresistible urge to play and engage in dialogue with this old space of concrete, glass, metal, dust and water. All this underpinned by the distant hum of a generator.
The first mental images the space brought to mind were of photographs in a book about derelict buildings from Detroit (Moore, A. and Levine, P., 2010. Detroit disassembled. Damiani). But soon these were replaced by a sense of organisation, structure, history and future that the space afforded in the complete multi-sensory experience of being there.
In my composition I wanted to express this experience, yet the strict 4-minute guidelines imposed a difficult choice. I eventually focused on intimacy and immensity, explored sonically through the play of the rain and the play of our actions.
The composition opens with one of my favourite sounds from our play: I found a simple metal S-hook and spun it at speed across an area of concrete floor. This tiny sound, simultaneously soft and hard, surprisingly excited the dimensions of space as a moment of carelessness in a cathedral. We then hear a sound from outside – a child’s shout from afar, magnified again by ‘far-ness’, and more sounds of our play then explode the place with sound. Then the polyphonic, changing rhythms and notes of the rain take over. With very little time to express these experiences in the composition, the droplets are first constantly shifting and then gain stability in time as they expand through space. The work calms into the slow, sweeping resonances of my own sounds played through the different loudspeaker systems and the natural rain falling inside the building, recorded by one EM32.
Our recordings were of long duration and made with many different technologies and techniques. Our take-home sounds were thus separate entities yet connected, many of them made simultaneously in diverse locations, and could be pieced together in a network of possibilities. Cutting or fading sections of these recordings felt like amputation, and in the 4-minute frame, rather than editing or layering raw recordings I employed many composition techniques to ‘heal’ the network while preserving the natural timing of the materials.
The technologies used in the composition were as follows:
(a) Two EM32s recording simultaneously in different locations. Parallel use of both microphones allowed rapid transitions between hearing the sound source close-up and hearing the immensity of the space that the source stimulated. Sometimes the spatial rotation of both microphone images was aligned, creating a singularity, while in other moments the rotations are set in contrasting directions as if listening from all places at once. In my previous work in the Reconfiguring the Landscape Project I had already experimented with recording an outdoor scene using two synchronised SPS200 soundfield microphones. This meant I had some idea of the interesting features that our double EM32 system may reveal, and in this instance, the microphones not only captured a greater spatial resolution, but were distributed much further apart.
(b) Two hydrophones dipped into puddles upon which the rain fell in large droplets, synchronised with one SPS200 microphone in the nearfield of rain falling on metal and wood structures higher up. These rain recordings feature in various ways – intimate, rhythmic, polyphonic, and expansive when treated as described in (c) below. As the hydrophones were each placed in different puddles, I had no expectations of a stereo image, but hoped for some sense of rhythmic polyphony when combining the two streams of sound.
(c) Impulse responses (IRs) were made with the six peripheral loudspeakers creating sweep tones, and one EM32 recording the response in the centre of the space. These IRs were convolved with the hydrophone recordings. In the composition the tapping ‘non-space’ of the hydrophones are then projected out into the distance.
(d) The IKO and the peripheral six speakers were used to project some of the sounds I brought with me into the space. These foreign sounds were from urban areas in Oslo, processed to enhance their inherent resonances. The contrast between the different speaker technologies completed the network of spatial activation: the IKO highlighted the closer surface materials, while the peripheral six speakers revealed the scale of the complete experience.