Am Anfang steht jedoch immer das persönliche Verbundensein mit den Orten: “I regularly visit the remote and nameless broken bridge, that is situated over a long drainage ditch that connects Holme Fen and New Decoy nature reserves, simply to listen. Each season I’d return to observe the sonorities of wildlife merge and coalesce with the hum of the long telephone wires that stretch across the wide and flat Fens. Within my audition I’d perceive different sonic characteristics within the same location and I soon began to record its vast polyphonic glory. By pure serendipity my water bottle accidentally struck the steel bridge, and it rang out like a gong across the Fen landscape. This inspired me to use soft mallet beaters to actually play the bridge as a percussive musical instrument and capture its resonant qualities. A subsequent desire was also to place my tiny DPA microphones inside one of the bridge vertical openings to act as a filter of the many sonorities within and outside of the metal bridge. The vibratory aural qualities of the bridge would differ depending on what part of the bridge I struck and what season it was”. Das Album erscheint am 20. Januar als CD und zum Download.

@ Discogs

“On 3rd April 2020 my father was pronounced dead from Covid-19. 48 hours after this devastating news I walked through New Decoy, a nature reserve in the Fens, and heard the vocalisation of skylarks. Their songs rang out across the resonant environment, or to use the lexicon of R Murray Schafer, across the ‘soundscape’, as the auditory image created an unexpected multi-species entanglement of sound-meaning correspondence. Self-aware of the decades that had past since visiting the Fens in my childhood in the early 1980’s with my father, the apperception augmented my profound sense of loss.

Helen MacDonald, author of H Is For Hawk, wrote about her experiences of the death of her father, and described how, in moments of deep grieving, she realised one is “clinging to a world already gone” The audition of the skylarks raised multiple temporalities in my consciousness, and connected the bird song to the death of my father through phenomenological turmoil. With urgency to capture this species that is in decline in the UK, and to create an archival audio document before the skylarks disappeared forever, I reached into my backpack and pulled out my portable field recorder and pressed the record button. I also employed underwater recording technology to reveal vibrational phenomena existing outside of commonplace audition. In the studio I composed a piano piece that weaved around the central field recordings of the Fens which I also treated by electronic means to achieve the sound and emotion I felt.” (Simon Scott, April 2020)

@ 12K

@ Simon Scott