Fade Away (play track below)
I manipulated and looped this synthesised sound, available in the Logic library to create a 'base' drone, reminiscent of a burbling set of continual happenings that could evoke the ongoing more-than-human processes always happening, though not always seen, in urban spaces.
This research began from a series of encounters with more-than-human wild lives near to my home in East Salford, Greater Manchester. These encounters happened over a period of around two years and ranged from happenings within my home-space to those that occurred in local wild green spaces – meadows, wetlands, rivers and woodlands. Some were chance encounters and others were more curated, such as a bat walk arranged by local rangers. Some were short and isolated and others were part of a more sustained longitudinal engagement with the river and woods close to my home over the two year period in question, which aligned with a number of national and local COVID-19 lockdowns.
As such, this research begins from embodied and placed experience – being in a particular urban environment over time and paying attention to the moments where I came into a particularly heightened or significant encounter with wild nature. It is invested in the idea that embedded and placed research can open up new elements of a familiar environment through repeated engagement and a sensitivity to particular shifts and openings and movements.
These encounters included the following:
- The sudden and violent death of pigeon chicks on our roof terrace, probably taken from their nest by a magpie
- Meeting a dazed hedgehog on the road outside our house
- An encounter with a deer, near to a busy road
- The repeated sighting of a grey heron in and around the River Irwell
- Encounters with bats as part of a curated walk, organised by Salford Rangers
- Attempts to grow and nurture plants in two ‘wild’ plots on our street
- The voracious and repeated growth of Giant Hogweed on the River Irwell, which runs through Salford and Manchester
From these placed encounters and as I explore below, particular practical methods were employed to explore the creative possibilities and to open up the feelings embedded in such moments through text, sound, voice and image.
Once the guitar tracks, digital and vocal loops were in place, I was able to work with Scott to develop the mix and structure of the piece, tweaking timings, working on dynamics and the flow between the elements. At this point, I also started gathering footage for each encounter to be used in the visual mix. As a live visual mixer, working with VJ technology to mix and manipulate images live, I look for short loops of footage that centre a distinct, simple movement or action in the frame of the camera that can be easily looped and mixed with other footage within the software (see examples). I also combined footage that was directly relevant to the encounters (that of herons and pigeons for instance) with more evocative footage of urban spaces and wildscapes to open up the feelings and meanings in the encounter, which could potentially be discovered in the image mix.
I made an image mix for each of the encounters outlined above (see examples to the right) and for which we had created distinct sonic landscapes. In creating the visual mix, I followed the methods of my practice as a live mixer. This involved setting up a ‘bank’ of footage for each encounter in my VJ software and then mixing the images along to the rough cuts of the sonic mixes, allowing the text and sonic textures to influence the image choice and how those images were mixed together. As is customary with my visual practices, I was interested in rough edges, glitching and imperfect images and the places where the edges of the wild spaces represented meet the digital technologies through particular visual effects that can be applied to the image and modes of mixing and layering different loops of footage. The result was seven short image mixes, which were activated live in the audio-visual performance and which were then stitched together with the sonic mix to create the fixed media single channel video version.
Guitar Demo (play track below)
This was the first guitar track that Scott created for the project, involving looped riffs and melodies. I worked from this track to explore vocals for the opening movement, 'Mourning Song' - see 'Refining the Text and Creating Vocal Refrains' below.
Mourning Song Vocal Demo
The track below is the first iteration of the sung vocal for this movement, arising from improvised singing to Scott's guitar track.
Lone Deer Vocal Demo
To develop the sung non-verbal refrain for this movement, I sang along to the digital Logic sound I had chosen as a base sound, while Scott experimented with guitar tracks.
In first addressing how to work with these texts as part of an audio-visual practice, I turned to digital and ‘synthetic’ sounds as available through the library of sounds in the Apple programme Logic, while also sharing the suite of texts with my musical collaborator, Scott Millar. In this phase of the project, we worked separately to develop these ‘base sounds’ for the project. In my sourcing of and play with digital sounds, I was interested in sonic textures that opened up the complex feelings I associated with each encounter and that sonically resonated with those feelings. As outlined in the insights and findings section, this was not always about ‘matching the sounds with the feelings, but sometimes about the sounds pulling that feeling into a different space.
Harp (play track below)
Like many of the digital sounds I crafted into loops, this Logic sound was not developed with any particular encounter in mind, but more because of the sonic texture it offered. Only later in the research process, did this sound 'release' feelings arising from my repeated encounters with the Heron (see discussion of findings and insights)
The piece was presented as a live performance at Outlaws Yacht Club in Leeds in October 2022. Here the performance involved the activation of the digital and vocal loops, alongside live singing, spoken word and guitar. The 7 visual mixes were activated and projected behind us as part of the performance. Documentation of the performance is available here.
A live recording of the audio mix taken from a rehearsal was then combined with the image mixes to create the fixed media version of the piece, which is available in full on the next page.
Following on from each of the encounters above, I noted down some responses in the form of broadly poetic texts. These were then gathered over time into a suite of writing, once I realised the connections between the texts in terms of the encounters with wild lives they were responding to (please click the text to the left to see the original texts).
The encounters themselves were chance in nature and the suite therefore represents a grouping of experiences after the fact of their occurrence. It is important that the experiences themselves were not staged or set up as part of the research. Rather, they acted as a spur and catalyst for this inquiry - the encounters precede the explorations I then engaged as a creative practitioner to investigate their feelings and meanings further.
Vaccine Day Vocal Demo
Again, I worked from Scott's ukelele track to develop the sung vocal for this movement. This is the first improvised vocal which emerged from that process.
The key methods and processes of discovery in this research are outlined chronologically below, with some thoughts as to how such methods and tools were employed to address the core research questions. In this account of process, I outline the methods employed and choices made at each stage and then follow this with a discussion of the particular moments and points in this process where insight, feeling and meaning emerged that opened up the encounters in question. These are then presented as key findings of the research in the conclusion.
Vaccine Day (play track below)
Scott developed this roiling, circular, shifting ukulele riff in response to my text for Vaccine Day about an injured hedgehog walking in circles on a road near to our house. We met it on the day of our first Covid vaccination.
As referenced above, the project is creatively informed by the tools and approaches embedded in my pre-existing practices as a live media artist and performer, which include
- Mixing synthetic sounds, samples, vocal loops and field recordings
- VJ style mixing of moving and still images, applying layering, shifting and digital ‘treatment’ of those images in real time
- An investment in enacting these mixing processes in real time, ‘on the fly’, even when recording and ‘fixing’ the processes in a recorded video or audio format
For this project, I also collaborated with a musician to develop guitar loops and refrains for each of the movements of the resulting piece (which corresponded to the individual encounters). As referenced below, I was interested in how these analogue sounds would ‘meet’ the synthetic digital loops that I was making and the vocal refrains and loops that are core to my practice as a performer.
With the base sounds in place for each encounter, I then worked with and from those sounds to both refine the text I had originally written, so it fitted the rhythms emerging and also to develop vocal refrains, using sections of the text alongside some non-verbal sections. I created the vocal refrains through listening to the guitar and digital tracks that had been recorded and singing along to these, recording that as a voice note in my phone. I then worked to develop the single refrains into looped and layered vocals that were captured through a multi-track loop pedal into vocal tracks that could be activated and built up live. These layered harmonies were contrasted with single vocal lines to be sung live and sections of the text that were offered as spoken word over the base sounds (see Findings section).
Here, I offer a few of the vocal demos for the different movements to share how the melodies and refrains started to develop.