Current Projects

We are all emerging from the constraints of the pandemic and are now able to get together, and plan events and possible performances.

1. We are able to get back to the Silo space and its acoustic (see below)

2. We are continuing with the successful ‘lockdown’ composing-recording-playing project whereby HARK connected musicians’ work with the various kind of video materials that I make. Some of these are longer Etude forms, for example: Richard Ingham, saxophone, is working on Fisheye River, Claire Garabedian, cello is working on GrassRustWind, Robin Mason, cello is working on FlowPatternLight. All these videos at various stages of completion can be seen here on the website.

3. I am hoping soon to be able to work with Stevie Jones on sound layering to finish the sound track for the remaining sections of Asylum Diaries. I continue to work with John EikCaffery and Aasta EikCaffery of EikCaffery Film on video editing.

4. We are exploring ways in which our work can be made into a performance, and we are looking at the requirements for large video projection, screens, dance spaces, and the combining of video, soundtracks with live music performance. We are collaborating with the St Andrews University Music Centre on this project

6. This website is a continuing project and we welcome feedback on it.

If you have been to the Opening page you will be familiar with the various kind of video. So here below are some further examples of current work: Ikons, Haiku, Etudes and Opus. For more examples of current work please check out the videos on pages : Openings, Past Projects and Collaborate.

Ikons are sounded glimpses of some feature of our environing world, small passing miniatures.

Haiku are short, usually 4 minute, invitations to dwell a little longer with sound and images.

Etudes are longer pieces which take a particular subject or theme, for example deep geological time in Cosmosis or link a series of visual elements — light, surface, pattern — in others. I have finalised one, Cosmosis and am working on three others at the moment and they are all being worked on by composers to develop the sound tracks for them. I show them here silent/unscored to give a sense of the visual materials. Flow has a number of episodes, from Fall and naturalistic beginning at the Hermitage Falls at Dunkeld, to Object, rocks. to and explores movements, flows of water, cloud. patterns. FishEye River is a study of the surface of the River Tay whereby the world is reflected on and in the surface, depths appear, light create ripples, and what can be seen o the banks seems to be what a fish might see. GrassRustWind is a compilation of shots of organic movement, first in fields where the uniformity of planting feels regiments and only lightly disturbed by breezes; a central interlude is a visit to a farm machinery graveyard where the mechanical beasts lie rusting and disused, cockpits are deserted, grass grows around deflated tyres, and clanking machines are silenced; the third episode tries to capture the wayward and unpreditable movement of the wind running through and away through the grass, the final shot is a memorial image — poppies come unbidden year after year, nature is always naturing, and post covid this seems like an optimistic thought.

But first, Cosmosis, the full version of the Haiku: Porous which opened this website. Here the sound and images take us into deep geological time (see the story of the piece in Sounding Stones in Past Projects). Cosmosis moves from the green surface that is disturbed by the scraping and striking of stones, to rhythmic rocking cascades of scree, to volcanic grindings, through meteor showers, tectonic explosions and an immersion in the creation of the sounded matter. Cosmos and osmosis — our composition as star dust and our waking porosity to the world imagined as the image/sound membrane where mind mingles with matter. The water surfaces bounce light around the sounds. Our immersion in the fluid molecules is like a sensory conglomeration prefigured in the small interstices of porous stone. A whirlpool is created by the struggles of a wasp caught in the surface tension of the water and it spins itself deeper and deeper into oblivion. The ‘Big Bang’ was actually silent, and here we feel its energy rippling out as waves, becoming sound. Your ear-drum attuned to the rock beats in a regularity like a summoning bell, and sound recedes into deep space as an echo. The hum of the cosmos: hairs of the inner ear. The ear drum moves less that an atom to hear this world. This is what I try to create — Atmosphere, through sensory elements that constellate into some idea or impression of the world.

Here is the long narrative Opus called Asylum Diary, in IV Atmospheres. This piece attempts to express some of the sensory aspects of migration and the paradoxical nature of seeking safety which is also exile. During the journey memories arise in atmosphere of being lost and aware of what is being lost. My working title for this piece was originally Hiraeth which is the Welsh for a sense of homesickness, loss of ones homeland, and the desire to express this eternal belonging which may itself be a dream. I still feel that way about the piece.

This is still a work in progress, and shows the elements that combine when the HARK Collective work together in conversations with the video material.showing. Here we share the whole pieces in IV Atmospheres in various stage of development. Here is a draft sound track of the third Atmosphere of the Opus Asylum Diary, (the long narrative piece about exile and migration), ‘Death in the After-Life’, now called Sacrifice. This is the point where the wayfarer meets not just obstacles but threats to their purposes and progress. They are entrapped in some underground or undersea dark environment that is sinking. The ‘noises off’ provide little comfort, some machines grind mercilessly. The breathing sounds are regular, suggesting purpose, but the engine sounds are arrhythmic like a reactive heartbeat not under control. The entrapment moves towards the distressing sounds of what I image the torture ‘waterboarding’ might sound/feel like. This soundtrack has been placed on the video (actually it was generated with Nick Virgo as we arranged my sound files whilst watching the video over and over again and experimenting) and the two together can be viewed at the foot of this page. The live performance will include a guitar playing a piece I wrote called tDread. You can listen to this in two forms here, first the dry acoustic version and then the changed sonority when it is played in the Silo space. These recordings also illustrate the way that sound/music is best played in the Silo acoustic space, — slower and more deliberate, with detached notes, to let the sound resonate, allowing the harmonic structure to created by the building as an instrument itself.

If you want to know more about the background to this work, the influences upon it and more detail on the Atmospheres please click on the link here to go to the paper on Hiraeth.