The dominant sound at the opening of Bat Walk (17.45 - 21 mins) is a tune I made using a ‘Toy Piano’ sound on Logic - tinny, slightly discordant and truncated bell-like sounds in a short and imperfect looped sequence. On reflection, this sound seems quite incongruous with the experience of a communal bat walk in the woods, but in choosing that sound for that encounter, I think something of the edges of that experience are revealed. Beyond the shared and genial walking with others to search for bats sits something more unsettling which is associated with dark woods and fields – more than human spaces as night falls and the transposition of the familiar into a world for other beings. It is the sense of an expanse of life beyond our understanding and the eerie realisation of a set of unseen continuities and happenings that are not seen. I also think the sound of the toy piano in combination with the voice with an effect added to make it feel distant, echo the way Robin Wall Kimmerer describes “species loneliness”, as ‘a deep, unnamed sadness stemming from estrangement from the rest of Creation, from the loss of relationship’ (2013, p.208-209). The ‘loneliness’ of the sound is that of humans feeling apart from their more than human kin. On the other hand, the building of the vocal loops at the end which I made in response to the text sections – ‘circling cedars’, ‘whispering grasses’ - opens a feeling of fearful joy and something approaching awe in this encounter. There is a real intuitive resonance which I felt in building the harmonies in the combined vocal loops here, which is the closest the whole piece gets to a sense of connection and unity between its elements.

Mourning Song (0.00 - 6.45 mins) reflects on the brutal and unexplained killing of pigeon chicks which had nested on the small roof terrace outside our attic. In developing the digital loop sound for this piece, I was drawn to a repeating low, wind-like sound, that evokes a feeling of emptiness and which is punctuated with a bell-like tolling that suggests a sense of mourning and remembrance. The spareness and emptiness of this sound opened up for me a sense of helplessness and lack, of a gulf in understanding and the spaces between us.

Scott created rich and melodic layers of guitar sound, with a diminishing movement and theme repeating. When singing the texts to the guitar track, I found a sense of deep loss, in re-visiting the inscrutable eyes of the pigeon mother on finding her chicks gone. I also felt the futility of my attempts to find a suitable ritual through adding tulip petals to the composting bag where I had placed the dead chick. In the singing of text, in combination with a nonverbal layering of sound that emerged in the final section of the song, a felt duality of reverence and mourning for the dead chick met a sense of helplessness and inappropriate feeling. Through the simple falling oohs in combination with the lack of meaningful action embodied in the layered spoken word - ‘and could think of nothing to say as I lowered you into the bin’ - this encounter opened into both a more expansive and more specific sense of loss. In it, I found the loss of particular loved humans and more-than-humans and again, the futility of human feelings in relation to the common violent actions that characterise some more than human interactions. It felt like an action both full of emotion and simultaneously a paltry token of human remembrance. Feelings in play in the sonic creation were discomfort, unease, loss, brutality, and a helpless lack of a meaningful response.

The practice brought out for me an ineluctable separation that felt grating and uncomfortable. It highlighted a human stupidity and awkwardness in the face of that which cannot and should not be explained, alongside the sense of responsibility that any privileged human in the Global North must feel about their actions in relation to the expanses of the more-than-human world. I found emptiness and plenitude in the ecology of technology that formed between my memories of the encounter, the open spaces of the digital sound and the rich distinct feelings described above that emerged in the guitar and vocal melody.

Insights emerging in the creative practice

Lone Deer (11 - 15 mins) describes encountering a deer on the edges of a wild green space, near a busy road. The chaotic ‘bright digital chords’ sound from Logic, with which I made a glitching, jarring, staccato looped synth riff, reflects the erratic movement of the deer, but also the dangerous ‘churn’ of the traffic. The darker feel to the guitar chords that Scott developed contrasted with this bright dancing digital sound, as did the slower nonverbal melody that repeats through the song. When creating this vocal line that starts with a low hum, before opening out into a higher ‘ee’ sound and then collapsing back into a lower ‘oo’, I felt like my sung voice was reaching out and attempting a wordless connection with this wild more-than-human other. The deer that live in the wild green spaces near my home are shy, nervous, skittish and mostly invisible. We find great joy in encountering them in the woods and meadows – they are special moments to have in the heart of a city. This more charged and edgy encounter, near a busy road, felt very different in the moment of its happening. In stretching and spooling out the dense thread of feelings it created through a mix of sonic textures, the nonverbal vocal in particular seemed to act as an attempt at connection, a wordless reaching, a wish for redemption, but also a lack of belief in that redemption. Strangely though, and particularly as I sang this refrain live in recording the mixes and performing the piece, I felt that the redemption it needs is not for the lone deer, dangerously close to collision and death on a road, but for us – for the humans standing close, driving cars in the early morning, passing through the more than human world without seeing, intent on all kinds of forward movement. As the refrain moves from the internal spaces of the hum, reaches upwards and outwards through the higher opening of the ‘ee’ and then retreats back into the lower ‘oo’ sound, that moment of possible connection and redemption, as felt in its voicing, is lost.

As referenced above, the real time image mixes I created for each movement of the piece were activated live and looped as part of the performance and then subsequently edited together with the audio to create the video output. The practice of creating these image mixes as a live response to the audio mix, drawing from a bank of footage and the capacities of the software to mix and treat the images in a range of ways, leads to a number of visual features that are also part of the discovery of feelings and meanings arising from the original encounters.

The visual practice refuses the singular smooth establishing shot of the nature documentary. Rather, mixtures of sharp and less defined images are at play including grainy, lower quality zoomed in shots

There is a range of masking and the revealing of images in and through others. Sometimes elements only become visible through the mixing of the footage and the ‘crossing’ of different parts of the individual images. Equally things become hidden in the visual mix, often leading to a loss of clarity and singularity. The visual practice plays with continuous processes of revealing and effacing, and never quite seeing fully.

There is a play with over and under-saturation of colour, leading to excessive colouration or bleaching out of colours – things look not quite right, not ‘natural’. This combines with mixtures of abstract imagery and more recognisable things in the world. There is presence and absence in terms of the wild beings themselves as well as within the more singular and simple framings and complex and chaotic composites of images, spaces and contexts

The swaying uncertain movement of the camera reveals a human presence in shifting relationships with the subjects of the shot. The imperfect image looping at the heart of the practice, arising from shaky, shifting human camera operations, means that the loops never quite meet up in a smooth and continuous flow, but glitch and grind against themselves and other images, so that depictions of continuous natural spaces, like grasses in a meadow or the flow of water in a river are in a constant state of interruption.

There are also a number of short, repeated looped shots of animals in spaces that recur and reverse – it feels like they are trapped in the images. There is little sense of the type of free and continuous occupation of environment that is often highlighted in wildlife documentaries and photography. This is altogether a more claustrophobic feeling, particularly with the repeated geometric built and industrial shapes impeding on wilder natural spaces through the image mixing – the bars of a bridge, the lines on a road, the pitch of a roof and the movement of vehicles.

The shifting and looping and layering of images often feels like a ragged and uneven rhythm of breathing in and out. Images blur and move in and out of focus, and there are unpredictable relationships between the overlaid shots, where different manifestations of objects and beings move beneath, across and into each other. These relationships between the things and their mediatisation - the ‘ecology of technology’ in the image play – open spaces of surprise in the mix.

Urban Wild_Life

Fixed Media Version

Image Mixing and Treatment

Sonic Elements

Grey herons live on the River Irwell near to where we live and though we see them regularly on walks and runs, they remain a creature that feels quite otherworldly and from a different time. The digital sound at the base of Heron (15 - 17.45 mins) is a simple four-part riff, constructed with a synthesised ‘harp’ sound - a more settled and reassuringly repeated sound than those in prior movements, made up of single notes and chords. It is accompanied with the sliding notes of the guitar. A more even and continuous rhythm and flow emerged for this song, echoing continuing cycles of more than human life even in the unsettled and edgy spaces of the city. The heron for me represents flexible, responsive, successful wild life happening in urban spaces. Though there is an incongruity, as the heron perches on an abandoned bike, there is also something that is right here, as the wild being re-purposes our rubbish into a perch and landing spot. The lack of sung voice in most of this movement seems to echo the holding position that the heron often adopts, closed in on itself, with all its energy held and contained. Though the text doesn’t include the moment of flight and release, the sung voice does. The lift off and release in the layered and reverbed ohs which come at the end of the movement is the opening up that you don’t get within the encounter itself enacted through song – something expansive and hopeful and dreadful and magnificent.

Giant Hogweed (25.15 - 31.15 mins) follows on in the theme of wild and recalcitrant (from a human perspective) plant life. This invasive and voracious species grows abundantly on the banks of the Irwell and is seen as a menace because of its dangerous, burning sap and seemingly unstoppable spread, crowding out native species. The ‘gamelan bells’ Logic sound at the beginning is bright, discordant and chaotic but is also shimmering and energetic and lively. The text expresses my wonder at the power and forcefulness of this much maligned plant and a rejoicing in its resilient being, while also fear of its dangers, its sheer size and spread, like something from a science fiction novel – a Triffid or the Martian red weed. We worked on the dynamics of the piece, with the chorus vocal ‘It is never defeated, it rises and grows’ as the sonic lynchpin around which the other elements were arranged and grew. There is, I think, something of the dynamics of its growth in the spare quieter sections leading up to an ecstatic emergence in the summer months, with the layered vocals and distorted guitar coming in. I felt multiple things in making this movement - joy and awe and fear and trepidation and doubt combine. That sense of the world without us, of plantlife creeping over lost human edifices and constructions is embedded in here somewhere. There is also a breathless release in feeling how energetic and resilient the more than human world can be, combined with a sense of a ghostly futurity and loss.

Vaccine Day (6.45 - 11 mins) describes an encounter with an injured hedgehog on a road near to our house. The first sonic element that was developed for this movement was the circular ukulele riff which Scott made to reflect the fruitless, dangerous circles of the hedgehog moving back to the middle of the road. Though I had digital sounds in place to use, I felt like keeping the ‘bare’ encounter between the sound of the ukulele, the voice in spoken word and the singular live sung section. I developed the melody for this section in response to the ukulele track (see demo above). Within that rising and falling melody emerged a wider sense of incompatibility and asymmetries of power, alongside a yearning which I felt in the melody for a connection between us that was utterly impossible in that moment. In the final section of the song, the rise of the digital sound ‘Dark Choral Landscape’ (to accompany a layered and reverberating vocal loop) feels like an apocalyptic break down of materials. Distorted, shifting, falling sounds open up the experience to something larger to do with what we are not able to do/enact/make right for these beings, particularly when they exist in the human-made spaces of the city. It felt like digging into these moments of ‘thick presence’ and discovering/gathering in them a wealth of complex feelings that might fleetingly pass through us in relation to our more than human co-habitants. It also felt like the sonic textures and mixes of sound were able to release intense and deep feelings of loss and helplessness that arose within these encounters.