A Closer Listen
The discussion around whether to (field) record or not has been an ongoing terrain of dispute between practitioners and academics. There is a certain feeling of disdain by some about pressing record as an act of extracting the best of an experience; and with it also often comes self- extraction and erasure of the “recording I” so that it all remains pure, intact, and accurate. Elsewhere, we find that recording is a way of remembering, keeping alive and of making heard. The “subjective I” is placed within an environment in an effort to make connections, to empathetically understand and to share, communicate, underline.
In both cases there is perhaps a drive to curiously listen, to become detailed and attuned, to analyse, feel and understand. A field is not a sterilised environment for conducting experiments but a messy place, a thick complex of human, more-than human and inanimate forces that are bound to co-habit, co-produce, fade away and change. You cannot dissect the sociological, the ethical, the political, the historical, the personal and the universal, the local and the global from the body of a field. They are all enmeshed to each other.
These are in a few words, the challenges that artists working primarily with sound have face in order to create, respond, make meaning and share it with their audiences. Like a scientist who observes, calculates, monitors, anticipates, forecasts and translates, an artist is a sensor, an empath who in the vast chain of possibilities attempts to creatively undo finitudes and certainties that cover up life in order to unearth lesser-known histories, subjectivities and ease our monotone rhythms by introducing little experiments of curiosity, well-researched detail and chance discovery. An artist who spends time in the field is never alone and always carries all the interactions and exchanges that have happened within her/his creative voice.
Lost -For Annie by Irish Sound Artist Natalia Beylis is a testament of all the above, an example of an artist’s dedication to creatively convey the multifaceted exchanges she’s had with a field. The field in this case is rural County Leitrim which has been Beylis’ home for the last many years. The two sides of this cassette release present in a very expansive way two distinct sets of compositions focusing on County Leitrim and the scale of multifaceted changes that have taken place. As the liner notes cite, the release is “a singular document of ecological activism, community engagement, and artistic expression that gracefully implies questions of how folk – human and otherwise – understand and cope with ecological and sociological changes.”
The piece on first side of the release, titled “Lost-For Annie” was composed to accompany an installation by artist Annie Hogg. Filled with natural and sampled bird calls, sounds of footsteps walking on soil and detritus, machinery excavating the land, and abstract instrumental sequences, the piece poetically conveys the depth of ecological and environmental destruction brought with the arrival of large-scale commercial farming and the deadly silence of the industrial, monocultural forest.
The pieces featured on the second side of the release were part of a larger collaborative multimedia project created in 2022 with artists Laura Gallagher and Kate Murtagh Sheridan in conjunction with a wider group of volunteers comprising The Leitrim Sweathouse Project. The focus of the project was to research the origins and uses of the many hidden and defunct sweathouses found in the peripheries of populated zones in Leitrim. These cocoon-like structures made of stone, spread across the edges of the landscape served as sites of healing and recovery and the three pieces attempt to retrace their material, mystic and societal impact. “Interviews with Participants of The Leitrim Sweathouse Project” opens a channel of communication with the local inhabitants and volunteers of this community-led research project on the Sweathouses. “Kate’s Ceramic” records improvisations artist Kate Murtagh Sheridan did with the Ceramic Sculptures she created for the project. The final piece titled “The Roots of the Mountain Ash Embrace the Stone”is inspired by an afternoon Beylis spent researching and exploring a sweathouse on the townland of Gubneveagh. Its expansive and sustained tones create a highly spiritual experience for the listener, a moment of rest and recovery.
Lost – For Annie is worth experiencing as it encapsulates a hyperlocal and micro-cosmic field in a very open, expansive and personal way. It provides the listener with a unique sense of place through sound and invites us to reciprocate the feelings of concern and wonder about this part of the world but to also be curious, involved and open-minded not only about our own microcosms but the worlds beyond it. (Maria Papadomanolaki)
Tue Aug 13 00:01:57 GMT 2024