I'm standing in a slightly darkened room, a crisp modern space with wonderful acoustics – the CubeGallery of Leicester'sPhoenix Digital Arts Centre. It could be a clean, almost antiseptic environment yet somehow this exhibition transforms it into a gritty, wind-grazed landscape. Or indeed a box of multiple places within spaces. As I walk around, I encounter a series of grey vertical blocks, knee high, supporting a button-pad and ear-pieces for the recordings I am to select. But they seem like cairns or stone way-markers pointing directions, signalling entry-points to soundscapes that are tagged with single elliptical words – 'ghost', 'cooling', snow', 'banjo' and so on. I am confronted with the multiple possibilities of a wide-open landscape, with the Road Not Taken as well as the unique track I make through its aural valleys and crevices.
And
that's just the experience of this exhibition in its 3-D physicality.
Before we play with sound and image, with silence and static and
eyes-closed pauses, with a full-on sensory rush of sound/
music/ talk
that is so vivid it is almost tactile.
Before we press the button and choose.
The
exhibition is 'poems,places & soundscapes' and
offers you exactly that. Curated by poet MarkGoodwin
and poet-publisher BrianLewis
of LongbarrowPress,
it is 'an
international exhibition of digitally produced sound-&-poetry
focusing on place & sound-scape ... featuring
various
poet, musician and sound-designer collaborations'
as
well as a
selection of ‘place-entranced
films'. There
must have been thirty or forty audio and film 'pieces', each
offering a different blend or collision of poetry/ sound/ music/
image and each transporting you to an entirely different place. And
then other possibilities opened if you listened intently to the
ear-piece, whilst also letting your gaze be reeled in to a
film-stream in another corner of the room. Not unlike standing in a
wide, wild landscape, where your senses and mind might tune into
cloud-shadows on a hill-side, navigational landmarks, bird-song, the
random noise of far-off contrails, insects in the undergrowth, a
stream of consciousness, wind booming and scratching against a dozen
surfaces, chatter and sudden silences. Choose what you will because
there is no one way, no one definitive experience and subjectivity is
all. Be present and listen.
Some
choices I made that day:
fice
(audio-work
at second post)
a
dissonance of tinkles, echoes, rhythmic words, monk-like chanting,
ribbons of singing, clattering wood – gradually a mysterious music
emerging of the whole blend.
ghosts
(audio-work at second post)
a
harmony of synthesised music, murmured phrases of poetry that open
into an intimate conjuring of memory and nostalgia that is quite
haunting. The landscape is urban, modern, but meshed in with the
natural at Westport Lake: 'and
on Sunday we'll walk round Westport Lake / remembering the beach …
and the ghosts of who we were .. and home to terraced houses/ if
you've seen one row of terraces, you've seen them all …'
Mesmerising.
cooling
(audio-work at first post)
another
urban place-poem unravelling into a series of startling and joyous
metaphors for the twin Cooling Towers of Sheffield: '
two big birds' nests/ in the poetics of space … under the skirt of
motorway/ two stout ankles … two grim bouncers/ to the nightclubs
of Sheffield … two huge brackets around/ a 1950s skirt of sky …
two jugs of stillness …' A
transcendent sense of the human in the city, in the industrial. Music
pulsing with the beat of the poet's rhythm and rhyme. Decades of
social history threaded through landscape.
banjo
(audio-work at fourth post)
twanging
banjo music underpinned by polar wind-whorling and a gravelly
American voice-over, reflecting on the narrative of 22 castaways
huddled under a boat-hut on the exposed glacier-strewn shore of
Elephant Island in 1916 ...
burbage
valley
(film-work at second reel)
extraordinary
charcoal drawings seem to conjure wind and rock, accompanied by a
delicate soundtrack of the same. Then the poem-text on the screen
layers in a third dimension of textures and symbols: '…
nevertheless the chalk hands/ stretch out to form their synapses/
where the grit-stone neurones happen ...'
Sometimes
I let the word-sign draw me in: what on earth is fice?
Sometimes I looked for a familiar foot-hold – the film-scape of
Burbage Valley
alludes to a Peaks landscape I've walked many times. And I could
hardly pass over Shackleton'sBanjo,
when my own second poetry collection was inspired by that polar
expedition. But mostly these were random choices that held me
entranced for a timeless afternoon.
And
now I can dip in again to other pieces on the comprehensive website
that accompanied the exhibition. You really must go there and trace a
sound-journey of your own through that digital space. It is helpfully
way-marked with photographs, interviews, blog links and all of the
exhibitions works accessible, as well as the posted comments of
visitors. A rich experience that alerts us to the possibilities for
collaborative poetry adventures, knitting together many crafts with
current technology. The overall synthesis is a mysterious and alive
and utterly human interaction with place.
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