Audience responses

Those moving through the bar who stopped to watch and listen were encouraged to write brief responses on the back of cards and drop them into the box. The following were the responses I got:

‘I loved this so much. Cope via smith via the massive via a canal walk and a shit bike – A & R X’

‘Hypertext: the act of live deletion –

Alon..(g)

Vs.

Alon…(e)

Setting up a conflict btw one statement and another’

‘Beautifully haunting – made me think of old folk songs about tragic lost love’

‘I like the ducks and the simple melodies’

‘Dirty Old Town vs. Brand New Town’

‘Many memories of teenage influences – strong ones – growing up just south of there – in Shrewsbury. Good to hear them in a fresh voice’

‘Speaking back to/from gentrification? Maybe more of putting “Salford MCUK” diatribe in dialogue w/older voices. Also, at the minute, I wonder if the images are not matching the dynamism of the sound?’

‘We heard about 5 mins and WE WERE TRANSPORTED!’

‘The poetics of the everyday is a dear love of mine. This gentle, lulling, sensory, atmospheric composition hit just the spot and it goes well with gin’

‘Folkifying the everyday – this works!’

Event outline

My aim with the next event was to work from the materials activated as part of The Salford Samples #1, to open up to others the discourse around Salford as a ‘place’, its musical history, and its present manifestations. In response to this aim, I worked on a distributed physical set-up for the event, including a number of stations with which those attending could engage and to which they could respond. This event took place in the Digital Performance Lab at MediaCityUk, Salford, in February 2016.

Station 1: Intermedial Mix

Set-up: Performer-activated video footage, sampled versions of songs from Salford, and voices from Salford in a continuous mix.

This ‘performance’ station, in the context of this space, was dominant due to the huge projection screen (see video footage above and to the right). As such, and as reflected in the feedback below, it dominated the event much more than I had anticipated and affected how those present felt able to respond to the other materials and stations present.

Station 2: The Broughton Missionary

Set-up: MP3 players playing audio excerpts from my diary on a loop, with headphones. Participants could pick these up and listen to the audio at any point during the event.

This ‘station’ was quite successful, in that everyone present was prompted at some point in the event to listen to this audio material and many commented on it. However, it did become something that was perceived to be in competition with the ‘soundtrack’ I was creating through my live performance and, as such, did not necessarily function as strongly in the mix as I would have wanted.

Station 3: Create Your Own Salford

Set-up: Images and bits of text, which can be moved into a specific combination by participants – filmed from above and projected onto the wall.

Many participants engaged with this station and their responses can be seen within the video documentation of the event. It did put into play some of the contrasts I had identified in the city, in terms of how it was perceived by others and the differing agendas in play. However, interestingly, this station functioned almost entirely as an individual activity and did not necessarily prompt discussion, as I had hoped. Again, the dominance of the sound/image of the performance may have had something to do with this.

Station 4: Have Your Say

Set-up: Participants were encouraged to respond to one of the questions below, through adding a Post-it note. Some of the responses to these questions are included below and reflect a diverse set of perspectives of the present and future of this city, from those who subscribe to Morley’s invocation of a place ‘slammed into deprivation’ (2013), to those who see a homogenising gentrification in play that will inevitably shift the nature of this place, to those who perceive a broadly positive movement forward in the city.

What do you know about the River Irwell?

‘It has shopping trolleys in it’, ‘It's cleaner than 100 years ago!’,

‘It floods’

Describe Salford in 10 years’ time

‘The road out’, ‘The sculptures in the quadrangle on Salford’s Frederick St. campus’, ‘I haven't found one – I should’, ‘Peel Park in the late spring’

What sound do you most associate with Salford?

‘Geese/ice cream van’, ‘A tram horn’, ‘Traffic’

Reflections and thoughts

The primary aim within this event was to explore the affects and meanings generated through the live vocal sampling of the music of a particular area, specifically in terms of what mode and form of ‘place’ is generated. I formulated the two questions below, in relation to this central inquiry. My responses to these, after the event, are recorded below:

How is this exploration of place affected by the filtering of these (mainly male) voices through a present female voice?

There were no significant responses to the gender question, which prompted this iteration, despite its framing in the publicity. Rather, issues of place – tradition, regeneration, and gentrification – along with memory and affective responses to the music were primary in terms of the responses. There was also an interesting response to the tenor of the work, which was established as a thread in the feedback. This was something about the mixture between a folk sensibility that was perceived in the material and the delivery and a ‘poetics of the everyday’ that emerged, perhaps primarily through the excerpts from the autobiographical writing and the footage from Salford, in combination with the layered vocals.

At this stage, moving a number of possible threads of movement forward, in terms of the project as a whole, the strand of the inquiry related to gender was ‘parked’ due to the lack of meaningful response to it. Though it is an area that is still of interest, it shows just how difficult it is, starting from such a broad remit for a project, to usefully refine its focus, as well as what is lost along the way.

How does this work relate to and activate place as a ‘constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus’ (Massey 1994, 154), as a ‘meeting place’ and as a ‘process’?

Within this event, there were key connections and points of resonance with Massey’s definition, maybe specifically through the notion of a shifting and weaving constellation of ideas and media that is constantly in process. However, social relations between participants were not directly prompted and this led to the formulation of a very different type of event in the next stage of the project. Mackey’s notion of place as space ‘animated’ and ‘made personal’ through ‘operations and actions’ (2015) was particularly resonant in this experience. The ways in which place was made personal in this solo event was through the act of documentation and recording of personal responses, which then intersected with the received or ‘found’ formulations of place through others’ words, statements, and lyrics.

Summary of emergent points:

• Changing place – regeneration, gentrification, tradition
• Place made personal – how the individual affective engagement with the material reformulates the place that is represented and activated
• The current lack of ‘social relations’ in the practice and how these might be brought into focus in the next iteration

Audience responses

The small audience who attended the event stayed for a round-table discussion of the work. The comments and responses focused primarily on questions of form, rather than on how that form intersected with the content. People commented on the scale of the screen and its impact on the other elements of the event. Some participants also discussed feeling slightly uncomfortable in the space because of my ‘performance’ work, which suggested a mode of attention that was undermined by the other activities on offer. Many people enjoyed being able to move the images and texts, as well as listen to the audio track on the MP3 players, but did not know how to position this activity in relation to my presence and ‘performance’.

Reflections and thoughts

From the responses to this more participatory iteration of the practice, it was clear that the space did not operate in the way I intended and this therefore needed further consideration. In reflection and on thinking about the movement forward of this project, I determined that the next two iterations of the work would take me out of the mix as a physical presence, in order to explore the mixes of materials without having to necessarily address the question of my physical presence and performance. This led directly to the third in the triumvirate of practices, the ‘video-text’ version of The Salford Samples and also informed the idea of a mobile exhibit of materials

I also realised at this point that I wanted to refine the focus of the inquiry somewhat from a more general consideration of Salford as a city, in order to focus on some of the place-based issues that had arisen from the initial stages of the research. Finally, I now felt ready to move the work into a more discursive stage, involving other members of the local community in the dialogue and in the ‘mix’.

Event outline

The first iteration of this project in practical form was, ironically I suppose, presented in London rather than Salford, as part of the EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) Sessions at Shoreditch Town Hall in November 2015. I had gathered in advance a range of visual, sonic, and textual material to mix live in two half-hour sets; these were positioned in the bar space, a necessarily transient space through which people moved as part of the evening’s performances. My defined focus in this event was that referenced on the ‘Sampling Salford’ page – that is, to play with my own female vocal sampling of a male musical history. These vocals were mixed with video footage I had captured, texts about Salford, and spoken-word samples (see video).