Tapping the air at The Library of Congress

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Tapping the air is a practice-based research project performed through a series of covert residencies and transmissions at locations associated with wireless and listening history. The air was first tap, tap tapped in 2017 with the temporary occupation of Marconi’s Lizard Wireless Telegraphy Station (Cornwall); site of the first ‘over the horizon’ wireless transmission in 1901. The most recent transmission took place in 2021, during a brief window of opportunity between COVID lockdowns, when I retraced the journey of that signal back to Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight and the empty concrete base of the missing radio mast which had sent the di-dit-dit of Marconi’s test signal over the horizon to Cornwall. Each ‘residence’ concludes with an unannounced (and mostly unheard) micro-FM transmission, broadcasting from the location of residence. Tuned-in through portable radios the performed transmissions are re-composed from field-recordings gathered in local landscapes haunted by the discarded remains of listening and communication technologies. 

Having spoken about the project at galleries and conferences in the UK and Ireland, in 2019 I was invited to present a paper at the  Radio Preservation Task Force Conference 2020 at The Library of Congress, Washington. Sadly, due to the Covid pandemic, the conference was postponed. But on the 26th of April, 2023, I took flight over the Atlantic to Washington DC to perform my paper, Tapping the Air, at #RPTF2023. Directed by Neil Verma and one of the largest events to be held at the Library of Congress, this ground-breaking conference brought together over ‘300 archivists, radio and television historians, artists, information scientists, journalists, curators, sound studies scholars, broadcasters and others.’

On my first day, I listened to songs of extinction (Alexandra Hui), the queer archives of Lesbian radio radicals (Stacey Copeland), the celestial short-wave mixing board of the ‘ignorosphere’ (Amanda Dawn Christie) and the Plutonium Blues tapes of toxic landscapes (Jay Needham). I was fortunate to meet Davia Nelson of the radio producers and artists The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) and attend their Keynote interview – one of the absolute highlights of the conference.
(Serendipitously when I returned home, exhausted and ill late on Saturday evening, I fell asleep to the radio lullaby of an edition of BBC Radio 4’s Something Understood, by The Kitchen Sisters. 

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As part of a panel on Recapturing ‘Liveness’, chaired by Nathan Moor and including Stephanie Brown and Professor Anne MacLennan, I performed the paper, Tapping the Air: Ghosts, landscapes and technology. Having traced Marconi’s signal back to the Isle of Wight, this variation of the paper submitted for the conference in 2019, includes images, words and sounds from the haunted landscape surrounding Marconi’s former Niton Station at Knowles Farm (IOW). In particular, the empty concrete base of the now absent radio mast: 

In the national monument of this mouthed hollow, the metal spiked teeth, which once held the radio mast aloft are still present. Tapped with a pebble from the geological fault of the Lizard Peninsula, the teeth chit, chatter and chime, pealing the sibilant consonant of Marconi’s test signal, back into the landscape.
Tapping the air. (2023)

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Whilst at the conference I took advantage of the opportunity to wander off and listen in on people’s conversation. Through this I discovered that the Library of Congress, has a vast complex of subterranean passages, connecting the buildings of the library and leading me from James Madison to Thomas Jefferson.  These tiled walkways are lined with hidden shops and the occasional still lives of museum storage. I arose from this underground mosey, up into Jefferson at the exact hour, the viewing public are allowed to join a queue for a brief 5-minute transient through the celestial vaulted silence of the research reading room. I queued, I rounded silence, listened, recorded and left.

Baird Auditorium, Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

The conference concluded on Sunday 30^th April, with a Listening Party at the Baird Auditorium in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. My sound work Over the Horizon, composed from the fragmented remains of the three occupations of Tapping the Air, was included in this listening event. Sadly, I had to leave on the Saturday and was not there to hear the catering susurrations chatter of Marconi’s metal teeth, tapped and sounded on the Isle of Wight, brought over the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean and received in the acoustic shell-like of the Baird Auditorium.  

Thank you #RPTF2023 for a fascinating five days and for a truly life affirming conference.

There is a summary of the conference here
And a short 2 minute clip of conference sounds and images here

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Martello Transmission: a song from under the floorboards

It’s night, and there is a gale blowing pitch dark. I am standing at the gate of a small wooden bridge which leads to the door of the Slaughden Martello Tower, close to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk Coast. Above the door, a light has been left on, keeping watch, and providing the tower with a filament of visibility in the darkness. Through a window the glimpsed illumination of a table lamp promises a sallow incandescent warmth, a warmth that waits and invites us in. 

I cross the bridge, ladened with the baggage of self-catering and the mute irony of a boxed-up blimp (a zeppelin shaped windshield designed to protect microphones from the noise of air). As I walk across, I adopt the autonomic gait of the funambulist, shifting the weight of body and baggage in immediate response to the turbulent airy whoosh that wraps around the tower.  Fumbling with a key, I struggle to open the heavy wooden door, double bolted with atmospheric pressure. As the door finally groans ajar, a hinge of air whistles, soughs, and susurrates. I close the weather behind me and lift a latch into the thick-walled silence of the empty tower.

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Built between 1808 and 1812, Slaughden Martello Tower is the most northerly of a chain of defensive towers built along the South and East coasts of England, in response to the threat of invasion by the French emperor Napoléon. The Tower is the last surviving remnant of the village of Slaughden; an important maritime port, which long since succumbed, not to the French, but to the tidal invasion of the North Sea.  

Modelled on a defensive Tower in Martella, Corsica, the translation to ‘Martello‘ was thought to have emerged as a consequence of the presumptive English Carry-On, that all Italian words end in ‘o’. With this slippage meaning shifts: in Italian, Martello derives from the hammer which strikes a bell and sounds a warning. Serendipitously if the ‘a’ of Slaugh shifts behind the ‘u’, we are left with Sluagh. In Gaelic folklore, the Sluagh are ‘Hosts of the unforgiven dead’ who take the form of gusts of wind:  carrying ‘off the soul of a dying person in a [fluttering] flurry of wings and screeches.

To the best of my knowledge, [the tower’s] effectiveness was never put to the test. The garrisons were soon withdrawn and ever since these masonry shells have served as homes for the owls that make their soundless flights at dusk from the battlements.
The Rings of Saturn. 2002. W. G, Seabald. 

In the ‘million-bricked’ up silence of the Martello’s shell-like, all sound becomes conspicuous. On the first of three nights stay, the dark is woken by the peal of whispered vowels and spontaneous consonants of a north-westerly, singing through the vaulted reeds of the tower’s architecture. Sighing out loud, a deep breath drawn through a fireplace disturbs in a deathly rattle, particles of soot caught in the metal throat of its current. Under the floorboards, 200 years old, the creaking songs of footfall haunt and hollow the stillness. Suddenly and from somewhere without origin, a dull thud hammers once loudly. It can only be moments before the tower follows Slaughden into the waves. 

Unstable or hesitant […] sounds and words, eroded yet persisting through time – a transmission that sometimes becomes a convulsion, deforming what is there still.
Singed. 2021. Daniela Cascella 

In the morning I open the storm door of the easterly window to find tomorrow rising yoke yellow over the squally horizon of the North Sea.

Radio, live transmission

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The architecture of the Slaughden Martello is a unique variation of the normal design. Instead of a single tower, four towers coalesce into a quatrefoil; a four-leafed brick clover.  Acquired by the Landmark Trust in 1971, the restoration of Martello converted the four towers into four rooms around a large, vaulted centre. Each tower and room correspond with the cardinal points of a compass; an easterly window peeks out over the North Sea, a northerly window looks toward the shingle-shore of Aldeburgh, through the kitchen, the front door looks back westerly across the bridge toward the river Alde, whilst a southerly aspect keeps an eye and ear upon the distant silent Mist of retired radio towers on Orford Ness. 

Eerie wooden structures more than eighty yards high which could sometimes be heard creaking in the night.
The Rings of Saturn. 2002. W. G. Seabald.

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Martello Transmission (edit). 19th February 2023. (06:50 mp3)

Arriving at Martello under cover of darkness, I smuggled in a cheap FM-transmitter, a bundle of radios and a folder of field-recordings collected on Orford Ness, some ten years hence. Here within this folder are the accosted derelict voices of ballistic pagodas and the encrypted Morse of air upon door hinge. In a clandestine FM transmission, broadcast from the tower’s vaulted centre, these confiscated voices mingle with others caught lurking in the stone tapes and wooden cassettes of Martello. Through the array of dysfunctional radio sets, weak modulating signals are transmitted live back into the ‘interfrequency’ of the tower, seeping through its walls, out to sea and over the horizon.

The broadcast opens with looped static of a tidal recording (a tide of silence) made over a decade ago, by immersing a silent grooved record into the incoming tide at Cley next the Sea. This is accompanied by the flued voice of the fireplace and pulled-chord chime of the tower’s entrance bell. The chime is rung by dance/movement artist Julia Hall, who enters the Martello and performs the compass of its architecture, opening and closing the four doors in a ritualistic circuit of west, south, east, north, west. This reel of latch and footfall performs in concert with the radios’ short waves of interference and the shingle shanties of rolled pebbles on floorboards.

In the tower FM reception is poor, but the Martello signal breaks through clear. Tuned in and out its song flickers briefly, before disappearing off air in the atmospheric mush of radio silence. 

Oh – we sowed our signals and we reaped the air. We eavesdropped on Plasetsk by loop. Algiers by backscatter; we tracked the flights of planes, the arcs of missiles, the paths of ships, the movements of train.

But we also picked up what wasn’t uttered.
Ness. 2019. Robert McFarlane & Stanley Donwood. 

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Pebble Shanties: A song from under the floorboards 2023. (01:27 mp3)

off the shelf

January 2023 will mark the fourth anniversary of the publication of Silence on Loan and its subsequent inclusion in the Artists’ Book Collection at Winchester School of Art Library. Published in the form of a 10” vinyl record, Silence on Loan sits shyly on the library shelf at 741.64 HEG: Four years of dust and silence have now come to rest in the silent groove cut into its surface.

Every year there is a free performance of Silence on Loan at WSA Library, which this year will take place on Monday the 16^th of January; coincidently the birthday of my mother, who died twelve years ago. In 2022 the Silence was performed without an audience there to hear. This year the performance is open again to the public and to the arbitrary ear of all library users. As with previous iterations, all those there to hear and those who’s listening the silence borrows, will be offered a commemorative hand-made pin badge, produced exclusively for the ‘event’. As an ‘event’ the performance of Silence on Loan is unremarkably low noise and low-key: an uneventful twenty minutes in which Silence is taken from the shelf, placed on a portable turntable, and rotated at 33 revolutions per minute.  The arm of the turntable is swung gently over the edge of the vinyl ellipse, and the needle dropped damply into the silent spiral of the groove. Nine or so minutes later the needle is lifted out of the locked rut of the run-off loop and Silence taken from the platter and returned to its place on the library shelf. This small inconspicuous ritual marks the end of Silence for another year, and is occasionally greeted with a closing, discreet ripple of bookish applause.

Silence on Loan
annual performance with free badge

15:00
Monday
16.01.2023
Winchester School of Art Library
Park Avenue
Winchester
SO23 8DL

To make Silence available to listeners around the world, the performance will also be broadcast live via Instagram: @sebastiane_hegarty 

The idleness of shadows

 

DFTPTMMYAIN, part 3 – The. 2022. Christof Migone. 

Earlier this year, I was one of the twelve artists invited by the Canadian artist and writer, Christof Migone to take part in his 12-year project: Different From The One Place Time Mood Mindset You Are In Now. 

With a knowing nod to Alvin Lucier’s, I am sitting in a room (1969) the invitation was to participate in, The:  the third word and part, of Christof’s annual dozen. Like Lucier’s magnetic room, The, composes its form from an instructed action: 

Room you are not in. Room where you usually make (sounds, images, objects, etc.), but that is currently running on idle. Idling in unintentional sounds. Room is lit but faded in and out after the fact (I will do the fade in fadeout). Camera captures room or detail (up to you), only one position throughout. Presence might be felt but is not present. You were there and you will be there again, but you are not there now.

The room where I make is spare, small and recently painted. It’s also the place where I keep and shelve the things I made and make with. On a desk in the corner there is an iMac with one Sonic Egg studio monitors on either side. An old straw hat perches ergonomically on the left-hand egg. 

The room has one window. When the iMac is on stand-by or off, the window is reflected in its screen; the dusty emptiness of the room behind made visible through the glass darkly. On sunny winter days, the light from the window casts shadows on the wall opposite, shadows that breath slowly in and out of perceptibility. I use these shadows as an opportunity to stop and stare and let myself dawdle in their idleness.

I made two films in response to the instruction. In the first and selected film, the stare of my iPhone is fixed on the wall where shadows appear. I pressed record, left the room and closed the door to. Twelve minutes or so later I returned to press stop. The twelve minutes recorded are uneventful. Shadows are slight and fleeting. The distant spin of a washing machine whines through its cycle. A draft from the open window, pushes and pulls the room ajar, creating spontaneous creaks, which occasionally synchronise with the fluctuations in light and less light.

In a more composed second attempt at idleness, I fixed the stare of the iPhone upon the iMac screen. I muted the microphone, and started a metronome before leaving the room, to return twelve minutes later and press stop. Visible through the blizzard of dust which covers the screen, the reflection of the metronome keeps time silently. An occasional particle of dust, drifting through the air is caught in the sunlight of the silenced room. This silence is replaced with the audible draft of the previous twelve minutes. The silent metronome announces and measures loss, whilst time creaks and idles in the dust.

In the late winter of 2021, sitting in front of the dim mirror of the iMac screen, I started to experience a bright and recurring flash in my left eye. Unlike the stained-glass spiral scotoma of a normal migraine, this light was briefly white and peripheral. Some days later drops of liquid dilated the aperture of my pupil and the attentive lens of the optometrist found a small tear in the retina of my left eye. As if to celebrate my visual field was immediately flooded with millions of black dots. That evening in a small, dark and automatically locked room, small bursts of a laser welded a line around the edge of my retina, the light so bright that my left eye seemed to lose the notion of sight. 

Through winter 2021 and spring 2022, there were four more tears and four more laser surgeries to weld my retina back into place. This has left my vision full of floaters, the remains of cells, casting their shadows on my retina. Like the wall and iMac screen, my visual field is full of dust and the idleness of shadows.

Emergency Eye Clinic: Southampton General Hospital

In correspondence

Prepared air harp. Dungeness.

Imagination is the power of appearing things, not of representing them.
The LIfe of Lines. Tim Ingold.

As part of two covert FM transmissions from Fog Signal Building, Dungeness, and Knowles Farm. Isle of Wight (IOW), I ‘prepared’ an autoharp with plectrum of dismantled clock hands and a pocket-sized museum of nautical litter collected from walks along the shoreline (tangles of fishing line, pebbles, shells, nails, feathers). As the sea breezes over the shingle and harp, fragments of text cut from the International Code of Signals are scattered, music suddenly appears, melodies plucked from thin and salty air mingling with the atmospheric static of FM transmission.

In this ethereal concert of aeolian song, music is immediately composed in correspondence with the breeze, melodies occurring neither in the objects or strings, nor even in the weatherly air, but appearing in-between them.

I borrowed this compositional method for a new series of drawings of sound on paper. These drawings or Correspondences, seek not to represent sound but to allow sound to appear, to draw the ear, by way of the eye, toward the potentiality of sound. 

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From Correspondence no.1 / no.2.

To compose the drawings, a small cardboard box was lined with two sheets of paper, and ‘prepared’ with relics from the preparation of the harp, together with fragments of charcoal, pencil, and broken ball points. The box was then weighed, stamped, and posted home second class. Three days later, having been handled with varying degrees of care, the box returned and the drawings appeared. 

Composed in correspondence with the systemised transit of her Majesty’s Royal Mail, the drawings are quiet, slight, and insignificant. Occasional dots, hesitant lines, and dusty corners stained with inky stillness, mark time, and motion, providing visible residues of sounds that occurred and ceased.

A Blink From Sonic Eyes, Drawings from the Fleeting Archive of Towards Sound at re:future Lab (Berlin), Installation Shot. Image courtesy Ruth Wiesenfeld.

The composer and curator Ruth Wiesenfeld teaches Awareness Through Movement, at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler, Berlin. Ruth initiated the project Toward Sound, which ‘collects visible traces of creative processes geared towards all sound-based arts exploring diverse approaches of rendering sonic imagination tangible.’  As part of Toward Sound, Ruth curates, The Fleeting Archive. This repository for visual ephemera of the compositional process, gathers: ‘Acts of drawing, sculpting, writing, filming, ordering, assembling and taking apart’, which ‘facilitate a deeper comprehension of ones imagined sound.’ Occasionally, selections from the Archive are exhibited in the guise of the ever-changing Rampant Wall. 

I was delighted to have works accepted into the Archive, and subsequently approached Ruth to see if she would be interested in taking part in a new Correspondence. The drawing would be composed in the space in-between us. I would prepare a drawing and post this to Ruth. On its arrival in Berlin, Ruth would listen to the appearance of the drawing as an appearing sound. 

Correspondence no.4. 2022. (636 miles / 24 days) Winchester to Berlin

The lid of a small box was lined with grey sandpaper and its base with thick handmade watercolour paper. Inside I placed an ensemble of small sculptural instruments constructed especially for this transit, using marine selvedge from Dungeness and IOW combined with fragments of graphite, chalk, charcoal, and cardboard.

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The correspondence was digitally tracked, leaving the UK on the 20^th April and arriving in Niederaula, Germany on the 24^th. It waited some time in non-EU customs for ‘preliminary import checks’, ‘processed’ and marked with a blue exclamation mark it arrived in Berlin on the 15^th May. All instruments were broken in transit, but Ruth emailed:

‘I just opened the box, look what was drawn…a whole symphony. It will sit on my desk until sonic responses emerge.’

Sound waits in-between appearance and appearing.

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Correspondence no.4. 2022.
(636 miles / 24 days)
Images: Ruth Wiesenfeld

I am not imagining

I am not Imagining. 2022. Sebastiane Hegarty

I am humbled to have had a new work on paper, short-listed for Best Imagined Sound in The Sound of the Year Awards. The other three nominees were poets Jonty Pennington Twist, Philip Burton and Alastair Hesp, who was announced as the winner in May.

The shortlisted sound is one of a series of new works, which use words and the percussive palpitation of a typewriter to imagine sound [and silence] on paper. The typewriter used is a recently acquired and rather beautiful, cream/green 1959 Imperial No 5 “Good Companion”. The typewriter arrived, fitted with a brand-new ribbon; my words the first to be written in its uncoiling, ink-soaked line of thought. 

In his book Gramophone, Film and Typewriter, Friedrich A. Kittler considers the typewriter “an innocuous device, an ‘intermediate’ thing, between a tool and a machine,” which ‘cannot conjure up anything imaginary’. But as a medium the typewriter corresponds with the silence of thought and noise of form, and in correspondence it dwells ‘at the cusp where thinking is on the point of settling into’ shape and form on paper.(Tim Ingold)

The noise of these words. 2022. 

In this new series of sounds on paper, the action and restrictions of the typewriter become an inherent component of the work.  The weight, vertical orientation and standardised A4 paper size, are regulated by the dimensions and habits of the machine, whilst the type is set in face and point: this Imperial No.5 types, in a rare Book Type Face, approximately 10 letters to the inch. 

The typewriter’s mechanical carriage of language is noisy and visceral, words strike out rhythms of sound, whilst the gesture and movement of my digits are choreographed and back spaced in correspondence with the words being formed and the systemised array of the Qwerty keyboard.

In this physical correspondence with language, sounds are both audible and imagined, appearing then in the moment of being written and imagined now in the moment of being seen.

A pin drop. 2022

silence was live

Silence on Loan. 2022. Performance broadcast live on Instagram

On the last Monday of January 2022, the annual performance of Silence on Loan, took place at Winchester School of Art Library. It was performed alone in the early morning before the library opened to the public and without an audience present. During the silence I wore industrial Ear Protectors, so even I could not hear the silence as it occurred.

The annual performance was announced in advance on social media and this blog, which included an invitation for people to not attend or listen. The performed silence was however, broadcast live (and mute) via Instagram, so that those who wished, might watch and not listen, together. The Instagram recording of the broadcast was unceremoniously deleted (by accident) immediately after the performance.

In order for those not listening to inform others of their lack of attention, a limited edition, I Am Not Listening, pin-badge, was available to purchase and wear on the day. The 1” pin sold out, adorning the lapels of people not listening, as far apart as New York and Keyhaven, Australia, Berlin and Wolverhampton. 

This year, Silence on Loan was unheard by what could have been its largest audience to date. A big thank you to all those millions of people around the world, who were not listening.

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I am not listening.

Last year the annual performance of Silence on Loan, was postponed by the ‘silent epidemic’ of COVID. In January, I had hoped to perform a socially distanced version, completely alone in the Winchester School of Art Library, where the publication is held – a lonely withdrawn silence, performed but unheard. But lockdown restrictions meant that visiting the library was not permitted and the annual performance had to be rescheduled, eventually taking place in August 2021 – coincidently in the same week as the publication of my essay Withdrawn from use: silence, listening and undoing, in the journal Organised Sound 26/2 (Cambridge University Press). 

This year silence has been recalibrated, returning the annual performance to January so as to synchronise with the original month of publication and the inclusion of Silence on Loan into the Artists’ Books Special Collection at WSA in 2019. But this year’s performance is different to the previous three. In remembrance, perhaps, of the socially distanced, isolated performance which never occurred, the 2022 performance will take place behind the closed magnetic gates of WSA library 2.

On Monday 31^st January, around 8:30 am, before the library opens and without visitors or audience, the unpaginated spiral slither of Silence on Loan, will be taken from the shelf and placed on the turntable platter. The unheard audio cassette that has documented every silent anniversary will be rewound. Last year’s silence will be simultaneously erased and recorded over with this. I will keep vigil as silence rotates, my ears defended from it: silence occurring with no one there to hear.

There is strictly no admittance to this performed anniversary of Silence of Loan. But you are invited to not listen with me. You may not listen wherever you are, at home, at work, alone or in company. You may also watch but not listen via a live muted Instagram broadcast at @sebastiane_hegarty

A limited-edition badge and calling card for those who care not to listen is available from: sebastianehegarty.bandcamp.com/merch

Thank you as always, Catherine Polly and all the @WSAlibrary team.

Withdrawn from use

mo[nu]ment. 2006-8. Sebastiane Hegarty

[Silence]

FIRST VOICE [Very softly] ¹

Shh. Shush. Hush. Schtum. Silence is often something imposed, an instruction to refrain, to not participate, something we leave behind when we hold our tongue and keep mum. It seems appropriate that many of the silencing verbs, which are primarily directed toward a silencing of speech, are onomatopoeic in origin; pre-verbal imitations of sounds that hold voice back from language. Even the physical action of the verbs’ pronunciation requires a narrowing of the mouth, a gesture which in the mumble of closed lips and shushed tittle-tattle of tongue against teeth, mimes the physical restraint of utterance. But the refrain of silence need not be a negative imposition, it might be a positive choice, an elective, collective and possibly selective withdrawal from presence. 

The above paragraph is from, Withdrawn from use: Silence, listening and undoing, a new article published in the latest issue of the journal Organised Sound 26/2 (Cambridge University Press). Edited by the composer, musician and academic, Tullis Rennie the issue explores Socially Engaged Sound Practices. In his editorial Tullis introduces a collection of articles which are: 

‘[…] decidedly diverse: in interpretations of ‘sociality’; and in addressing distinct areas and eras of sound practices – the contemporary, canonical and hereto less-heard. Considering this issue as a single entity, the authors thus become united in their aim to diversify the conversation, in decentralising theoretical approaches to the subject matter and in the positive inclusion of a wider variety of voices, experiences, sounding bodies and attitudes to listening.’

I am delighted to be amongst such a diverse and fascinating collection of articles and authors, which includes Catherine Clover, whose article, Oh! Ah ah pree trra trra, extends sociality beyond the human to ‘speculative and expansive interspecies encounters’, Sam Mackay who examines ‘The sonic politics of “Clap for Carers” […] as participative sonic arts practice’ and Chris J. H. Cook whose article, Trevurr: A dialogic composition on dementia, auraldiversity and companion listening, ‘documents important aspects of participatory practice with neurodiverse collaborators, told through the lens of a co-created sound work.’

Duet for Vinyl [extract]. 2004

Withdrawn from use: Silence, listening and undoing

Abstract

In his book Giving Way, Steven Connor provides a list of unappreciated qualities. This list starts with a capitalised, ‘SILENCE’. Shyness, reserve, withdrawal and holding back accompany silence in a long sentence of qualities, which ‘tend to be marked with disapproval, sympathy or revulsion’, and some of which are, as Connor notes, ‘characterized as a mental disorder, in the form of social anxiety or social phobia’ (Connor 2019: 1). 

Silence is often seen as a lack of agency, an anti-social and suspect unwillingness to participate. But as a sound artist working with field-recording, I am aware that silence, withdrawal and holding back can also be a form or method of participation and social practice. Since 2004, my sound work has included a series of physical and imagined silent releases. The article draws on these works and the writing of, amongst others, Steven Connor, Seán Street, Hamja Ahsan, Gaston Bachelard and Dylan Thomas, to explore silence as a potential, shared and communal space; an immediate composition that invites both listener and non-listener into its congress. Listening in on the conversation of telephone pauses and the closed paragraphs of library shelves, silence can be heard undoing purposeful agency, shyly engaging us in the anti-social practice of inaction, so that we might not participate, together.

I am grateful to the editor of Organised Sound, Prof Leigh Landy, Tullis Rennie, Jan Baiton and the peer reviewers for their critical guidance and support. Thank you as always Julia Hall for your insight and patient ear.

Organised Sound 26/2 is available on-line here.

1. Dylan Thomas. 2016. Under Milk Wood.
2. Steven Connor. 2019. Giving Way

Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp

A new album of seven Séances for air guitar hour hand and harp is now available on Bandcamp.

In a concert of paranormal music, notes are plucked from thin air as the haunted strum of votives, hour-hands, and the missing fingers of an amputated doll’s hand, play upon the strings of an electric guitar and abandoned autoharp . Divined in séance with the breeze and occasionally breaking through the interference of a faulty guitar socket, invisible melodies emerge, cluster and evaporate:

teasing […]
sound out
of

substance: the
air
paired fibrous
with
syllables: 

Earth as Air. Gustaf Sobin

The ethereal music of aeolian instruments, has long been associated with other worlds and ghostly communication. In his poem, The Eolian Harp (1796), Coleridge refers to: ‘Such a soft floating witchery of sound’. For Coleridge music sleeps in the air:

Where the breeze warbles, and the mute still air 
Is Music slumbering on her instrument. 

William Jones, the 17^th century natural philosopher, proposed that this ‘slumbering music’ originated not in the strings of the harp [or guitar], but in the air itself. The instrument operated as a ‘sound prism’ ‘[refracting] the wind,’ dividing [divining] and revealing ‘vibrations […] already present in the air.’

Séance for harp hour hand and bird song. 2021. Film still.

As a premonition of the album’s forthcoming release, a new short film made in correspondence with the piece Séance for harp hour hand and birdsong is available to view on Vimeo.

The full septet, Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp, is available as a digital download via Bandcamp. The album download includes a bonus track, Séance for stones radio mast hour hand and harp, recorded in 2021 at Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight, and featuring the litho-telegraphy of a pebble tapped on a missing radio mast, choreographed and performed by the movement artist Julia S. Hall. As the former location of Marconi’s radio experimentation station, Knowles Farm was the site of the first ‘over the horizon’ wireless transmission to The Lizard Telegraphy Station, Cornwall in 1901. This track, which featured at the Helicotrema X festival of recorded audio (Venice, Barcelona, 2021) is also included with the hand-rendered, artist limited editions. These physical editions are available in three forms: 1. Artist edition audio cassette + album download; 2. Artist edition A6 Séance card + planchette + album download; 3. Very limited full set of, audio cassette + Séance Card + planchette + album download. Full details below.

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Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp:  Artist Ltd Edition Audio Cassette C40
Cassette + album download + bonus track
Edition 6
An artist limited edition audio cassette. Hand rendered each cassette is individually numbered and signed/dated with an artist edition stamp. Designed and produced by the artist, the cover/insert is printed on tracing paper and each cassette and case hand labelled with individual letters and numbers referring to its position in the edition sequence. The cassette includes the bonus track, Séance for stones radio mast hour hand and harp, recorded in 2021 at Knowles Farm on the Isle of Wight.

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Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp: Artist Ltd Edition Seance Card
A6 Seance Card + planchette + album download + bonus track
Edition 20
An original artist edition A6 postcard, printed on luxurious 600gsm superfine card, uncoated on both sides.
This artist edition postcard has three visual variations (readings).  Hand numbered, signed/dated with the artist edition stamp, each postcard is accompanied with a free album download and a rubber-stamped hand planchette, which may be used to hold séance with other worlds. The postcards have been shuffled and will be sent out in the order divined by the shuffle.

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Séance for air guitar hour hand and harp:  Full Set: Artist Ltd Edition Audio Cassette and A6 Seance Card
C40 Audio Cassette + A6 Seance Card + planchette + album download + bonus track
Edition 5
Combined artist limited edition of A6 postcard (with hand printed planchette), audio cassette and full album download including bonus track.

Please note: Cat is for scale purposes only and not included in package.

All digtal and physical media formats are available via: sebastianehegarty.bandcamp.com