5.3.2 Beàrnaraigh


Beàrnaraigh was a work recorded in June 2018 on the small Outer Hebridean island of Beàrnaraigh Mor.1 Informed by the experience of Around the Wind, which spanned over 10 hours, here my idea was to produce a presentation of an island and of a day.

 

Between the 9th and 28th June 2018 I made four static recordings over three days that together covered a period of 24 hours and I made 17 walking recordings across eight days that together spanned from 06:27 to 17:45 (below left).2 Together the walking recordings presented a circumnavigation of the island (below right).

 

I used these recordings to compose a virtual day of 24 hours containing a (near) circumferential walk of the island shore (the north-east and south-east corners were inaccessible).3

 

Beàrnaraigh: Resonance Extra

With the recordings sequenced from 00:00:01 and running through to 24:00:00, and entitled Beàrnaraigh, the work was broadcast as 24 sequential one-hour episodes.4 Each episode was accompanied by a composite image of Beàrnaraigh and each had a spoken introduction and a brief outro (both below). Two of these one-hour broadcasts are included in the curated list of files for examiners.

Beàrnaraigh: Radiophrenia

The work was also broadcast as a continuous, 24-hour piece, without the spoken words, as the concluding work of Radiophrenia 2019. With the recordings arranged to correspond to the time that they were recorded—starting at 00:00:01 and running through to 24:00:00—it was broadcast ‘real-time’ starting at midnight and running through to midnight the next day.

 

This was a ‘new day’, the whole of a single diurnal cycle (as well as presenting a circumnavigation walk of the whole of the island), yet given the compositional nature of the work, the continuity of time is an illusion as I took recordings from across 20 days to create one day.5 Having previously argued against mixdowns, when creating replicated walk works for radio (such as Orford Replication), here I experimented with doing exactly this. My concern was the loss of sonic clarity and definition within a mixdown. Here, for much of the time, only two tracks were playing (though this went up to four for short periods) and such a degree of simultaneity felt, and to me sounded, acceptable.