Sounds of Silence
Various Artists
Five sound works inspired by the Lakes in lockdown, created by artists with deep bonds to Cumbria and commissioned through an open call. Expect birdsong, villages lost to flood and imaginary mountains.
Imaginary Mountains
Michael Denny and Simon Sylvester
Imaginary Mountains is a 45-minute soundtrack to a walk in the wilds of another Cumbria. Combining music from acclaimed composer and music producer Michael Denny with a narrative from award-winning writer and editor Simon Sylvester, the soundscape is a continuous piece of music and spoken word that explores themes of loneliness, emptiness, departure, arrival and belonging. The work explores the shared experience of all citizens under lockdown — the fears and frustrations, the tragedies and triumphs.
The Drowned Valley
Goodnight
A visit to Haweswater as a teenager during a drought instigated a deep fascination with the lost village of Mardale Green – long since flooded to build a reservoir now providing water for Manchester. The Drowned Valley is a fantastical musical journey, attempting to resurrect a ghost from that time and place them in the peaceful yet uncanny surroundings of a lockdown Lake District.
Birds of Lakeland/Birds of Lockdown
Polly Atkin and Will Smith
Take a virtual walk with poet Polly Atkin and bookseller Will Smith as they wander common land at the fringes of Grasmere during the Spring and Summer of 2020.
Polly and Will began to record birdsong during their walks at the start of lockdown using the BirdNet app, comparing their observations with Mary Armitt’s year-long survey of ‘The Birds of Rydal’, published in The Naturalist in August, 1902.
Birds of Lakeland/Birds of Lockdown interweaves their recordings with spoken word, and commentary on the landscape and changing conditions, to give a glimpse of a moment in, and across, time.
Rewindled
Jack McNeil
Inspired by soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause, who explores the impacts of soundscapes on ecosystems, Rewindwild is a personal exploration into the sounds revealed by lockdown and how we listen and respond to ‘noise’ returning to the Lake District.
Field recordings reconstruct soundscape elements of geophony, biophony and anthropophony into a new, imagined sonic environment. Bass clarinet contact mics create woodland floors and leafy canopies, teeming with life and hidden patterns. Half-pitched air and articulations become playful gusts, while melodies (clarinet, bass clarinet and voice) weave a lyric through the piece.
Is This Just One Day?
Emma Nuttall and Taylor Nutall
During the stillness of the pandemic, hidden sounds of the Lake District return. The crunch of solo footsteps along the lakeside, the delicate pillowing of rainfall softening the edges of a dark day, and – somewhere in the trees – the snap of a twig. A deer is disturbed. The birds scatter in a shrieking squall.
Sound unites us with our living context… emplaces us. Use your headphones to take in the elements of these soundscapes. Let notes trigger feelings, tones take on their own textures and meaning and imagine yourself to be present in the Lake District for one day.
But sound also marks out moments in time: the dawn chorus, songs from when we were in love, or snow-quiet winter mornings. Revealing not only a physical space, but also internal geographies of memory, time and meaning.
On your journey, listen for the quiet atop a mountain, for rhythms, repetitions or overtures of legacy. Catch the irreversible beat of time, the cadences of decay and the whispers of things forgotten, left unremembered.
Here are places both yearned for and enveloped by, where the past and present coalesce across the landscape, overlapping, intertwining and harmonising. Where the landscape begins to forge us, as we have forged the land.