News
AUTUMN 2023
Singing with the Exe On Saturday 23rd September I’m very pleased to be co-leading a Singing and Listening Walk along the Exe riverbank from Exeter Quay to Exmouth, blending our voices with the changing Exe habitats and tuning our ears to the river’s music.
We’ll learn simple songs of the river. There will be stops for refreshment and song, led by community choir leaders Sarah Pennington and Tess Read. And we’ll take time to listen to the river together.
The walkers will meet at Exeter Quay at 10am and arrive at the Railway Club in Exmouth at about 5pm where you can purchase hot drinks, cakes, pasties, and a range of beers wines and soft drinks. We’ll be entertained there by the Woodbury Whalers. If you’d like to bring a song to share, please do! (No amplification).
July 2022
Routes for Roots Pinhoe Map Project
This month I’ll be doing three Sound Walks, together, with residents in Pinhoe, as part the Clyst Valley Regional Park Routes for Roots Pinhoe Map project. Book via the link below.
Tuesday 12th July, 10am
Friday 15th July, 6pm
Wednesday 20th July, 2pm
https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/routes-for-roots-pinhoe-map-project-466159
June 2022
Exeter Sound Walks on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme
I took journalist and radio presenter Mishal Husain on a Sound Walk on Tuesday 14th June. The piece was available for a week on BBC Sounds, and is sadly no longer available.
An Evening Symphony, with Barbed Wire
A Sound Walking podcast conversation between artist Volkhardt Müller and myself, in three movements. Many of my Exeter Sound Walks have brought me to the city’s limits which for various reasons we can’t or don’t transgress. Volkhardt is an Exeter based multidisciplinary artist with a professional interest in landscape, how people shape it and how it shapes people. We walked the City Edge, one evening in May. Commissioned by Art Work Exeter for Art Week Exeter 2022.
1st Movement: Swifts, motorbikes, barbed wire
2nd Movement: Holloway, midden, gorse
3rd Movement: Freedom, farming, blackbirds
The podcasts were premiered during Art Week Exeter 2022 on Devonstream online radio station that streams the sounds of Devon, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Listen in to hear music of all genres – from hip-hop to punk to choral – alongside drama, spoken word/poetry, documentaries, features, soundscapes and more. Everything played has a link to Devon. The brilliantly varied content is on rotation, so you never know what you’re going to get next. I love it.
RECIPE for A SOUND WALK
Here’s a recipe for a Sound Walk that I made in February for The Walkbook: Recipes for Walking & Wellbeing. https://walkcreate.gla.ac.uk/the-walkbook/
I’ve just received a copy of the book. My ‘recipe’ layout has been changed, somewhat, from the original but the ingredients are the same. It’s lovely to see it included as one of the 30 and I’m greatly enjoying reading the others – a rich mixture. ‘Each recipe has been devised by an artist and aims to inspire and entice. We invite you to surprise yourself, see [hear!] your local environment anew, leave messages for others, pause between steps…’.
June 2022
EXETER SOUND WALKS featured in ART WEEK EXETER 2022
I’m delighted that Exeter Sound Walks are featured in this year’s Art Week Exeter from 6th – 12th June 2022. More info about Art Week Exeter.
Illustrator Hannah Mumby has created a composite map of all my maps that is pasted up on the wall at Exeter Phoenix – you can find it on the ground floor opposite the steps down to the basement. Hopefully people will be able to download my maps from the QR codes listed there.
I’ve created a Sound Walk podcast conversation with Volkhardt Müller that you will be able to listen to soon.
And there’s a Sound Walk, together, on Sunday 12th June at 2pm. Contact me for details.
November 2021
The tree inhales and stills the air’s fibrillating breath, holding it in wood
This is a field recording with video piece commissioned by Cine Sisters SW in autumn 2021. The title comes from David George Haskell’s wonderful book The Songs of Trees. This piece listens to musicians practising in their homes from outside. Sometimes we see them, sometimes we don’t. We hear them, and we hear everything around them. Maybe we hear a connection between the two worlds, or maybe we don’t. I hear humans in their habitat as part of the ever-unfolding musical composition of our only home: Earth. I hope listening in this way can help us consider how we live here, and, like the musicians striving for perfection, how we might make our human contribution more beautiful. The recordings were made using binaural headphones, to place you right in the middle of the sound, so it’s much best listened to through headphones!
Spring 2021
‘All the sounds we can hear’
Earlier this year I had quite a lot of fun making a video about listening and Sound Walks as part of Devon Libraries’ ‘Creative Challenges‘, for people to discover at home. Here it is, and if you follow the Creative Challenges link you can find other ideas for art activities aimed at primary age children and their families.
July 2021
A Quiet Night In will perform At the end of the day in Exwick Mill Field, Exeter, 7.30-9.30pm on Tuesday 27th July. Our piece is part of Outside the Box a festival of outdoor performances supported by Exeter University, Exeter Culture and Exeter Business School. To book, click on the flyer below.
June 2021
I’m very happy to be leading three more Sound Walks, together in June and July.
Emily Traynor of Exeter’s Live and Move project wrote about Exeter Sound Walks in their latest ‘Community Stories’ feature.
February 2021
A SOUND WALK with EATWEEDS’ ROBIN HARFORD
In November 2020 I had the pleasure of making a Sound Walk with expert forager Robin Harford. The resulting Sound Walk is ‘CITY EDGE, November 2020’. It runs up the ancient Hamlyns Lane around the edge of Exwick, dips down into housing and back up to the glorious Whitycombe Way Nature Reserve.
After our walk, Robin and I recorded a conversation as part of his Eatweeds Podcast series, which I highly recommend delving into. Here’s our conversation: https://www.eatweeds.co.uk/ep37.
January 2021
Podcast: Sound Walking in Suburbia – perception, patterns & delight
The resulting Sound Walk, ‘UP BARLEY MOUNT, Exeter, November 2020’:
December 2020
In autumn 2020 Maketank invited me to make a piece on the Hammond organ that is resident in its building on Paris Street, Exeter. Olya and Brian wondered what the organ might have to say during this time of locked down arts and culture, alone in the former sofa showroom in central Exeter. Here is the piece, Maketank, Paris Street, 15th December 2020.
October 2020
Podcast: The Music of Exeter and Kyoto
The music of Exeter and Kyoto podcast was commissioned by Art Work Exeter for their Resilience project. I invited composer Makoto Nomura and curator Mari Satomura to compose a Sound Walk in their Kyoto neighbourhood. We compare our experiences of being musicians during COVID, and we share our listening practice and Sound Walks we have made. Please enjoy Makoto Nomura and Mari Satomura’s Kyoto Sound Walk, below – there’s a lovely, hand-drawn map followed by their sound descriptions. The podcast also refers to sounds I found on the local rugby pitch while making my Sound Walk ‘PEOPLE to PEOPLE’, so I’ve added it below, together with a recording of the musical rugby posts.
Here’s my own rugby post performance, unedited, including my squeaky boot – and many other sounds – as I walk between the goals.
(Best listened to through headphones.)
Is my description, ‘they all sound the same pitch’, correct?