Now Open Sat/Sun
Now Open Sat/Sun
Phygital Phonics 3.
Send us your Audio Recordings of Thin Places
to contribute to our hybrid digital+physical Sound Art Event!
An experimental event led by HARI
Continuing our Phygital Phonics project, for its third theme we are inspired by the work of abstract painter Annie Luke Turner to Listen to Thin Places.
The first event was for a commission by AxisWeb, as part of their Let's Get Phygital experiment, and was so successful we're doing it again with another free event that will take place both in our building at 47 King Edward Street, Hull City Centre, and online on Sunday 10th December 2023.
Contribute your audio recordings to the project, then Pheobe Riley Law will give the recordings to Sound Artists both based in Hull and around the world to use within experimental compositions, for performance at the hybrid physical/digital event.
Following Annie's inspiration from Thin Places, we ask you to consider what Thin Places you know and encounter. All interpretation of the theme is fine by us, we are interested both in the sounds of thin places themselves, and moments which seem thin to you.
What to do:
-
Wherever and whenever you have something to celebrate, use your telephone (or other device such as a dictaphone) to record the sounds around you - however boisterous or quiet they may be.
- Take a couple of photos of the occasion, whatever makes sense to you.
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Send us your sound file and the photos, with a brief description.
* You can send us as many sounds as you like!
Send us your contributions to add to the library by email to hullartistresearch@gmail.com.
We are looking for audio files of approximately 1minute duration, but this is not exact - its an amount that leaves some room for play, but is easy to email without eating your data! If you want to send longer or shorter that's fine too, and you can identify a section for us to edit out if you want to.
If you would like to edit your audio, you can download a simple free audio editing programme; we recommend you use Audacity.
Pheobe Riley Law will then work with sound artists to select the files they will each use for the event.
The library will remain on this site, and will be added to for future Phygital Phonics projects with different themes. We look forward to receiving your contributions, and hope to see you in HARI or online for the event!
DO YOU HAVE A SOUND
TO ADD TO THE EXPERIENCE OF
THIN PLACES?
The sound I have contributed is the sound of the Sea, which is my go to memory of a place, which I have been visiting every summer, since I was a two year old child. It is in Pembrokeshire. It has inspired art work from me over a long period and is where I feel most at ease. The painting I am including is appropriated from ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ by Gericault. My family are clinging to this raft, while threats of catastrophe abound. It also includes references to other paintings, such as Casper David Friedrich`s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’.
The sea is and can be a frightening place, but for me, as for many others it helps me breath easy like the tide going in and out.
Julia Roach
I took the first few just to record some moments in time, and because the rides are so strange when you think about them. They're overwhelmingly loud, playing dance music you'd only otherwise hear in a club, moving your whole body bizarrely for joy under the uncanny gaze of airbrushed ravers. I only like to be rotated around an axis personally. Hull Fair sits in the Hull calendar immovably as part of an autumnal triplet with Halloween and bonfire night. It feels a bit magic. A thrumming city of light whose vastness impresses upon you for one week only before leaving behind an empty carpark.
Jasmine Hale
Vickie Bissett
Thomas Robinson
A Costa coffee shop on a trading estate bordering Grimsby. An edge place sprung up from a wasteland of rubble that was formerly populated by scrubby weeds, rusted wire and
accumulations of the faded, decaying detritus synonymous with carelessness and local deprivation.
The groaning, screeching sound comes from the automatic sliding door, reacting to real and phantom figures passing through. A doorway is surely the thinnest of places, purely transitional, neither here nor there.
Ellie Collins
The distorted sound of a corporate business park with a motorway river as sensed by x: an altered-ego lost on europarc island.
Marc Renshaw
Walking the ancient turf labyrinth at Julian's Bower.
Annie Luke Turner
Incoming, incoming.
Having grown up on the west coast of our island, it was only when I eventually found myself in East Yorkshire that I was to experience the joy and exhilaration of the annual arrival of migrating geese from Scandinavia and Russia.
I distinctly remember the first time - stood outside of Hull's Central Library in the 1970's, I became aware of a sound, which I could only relate to the opening of the Beatles ' Tomorrow Never Knows' on their ' Revolver' album. An at first distant, but steadily growing, excited yammering in the skies, where a skein of wild geese were passing overhead in a none too perfect geometrical pattern. Was it a means of keeping formation, mutual encouragement or just sheer excitement to be once again, over dry land, in the knowledge that the long flight was nearing its destination? Who knows?
It's long become a regular marker for me in the passage of the seasons. Like the first shiny conker at my feet or the sudden dash of red on the Virginia Creeper, it is a harbinger of Autumn and as a result, is a bitter sweet message, which has been shared with mankind for millennia.
Recording: ' Canada geese in flight' ( by kind courtesy of Pixabay). Image: Migrating geese over Skidby Mill, September 2021
Roger Roach
I used an electro-magnetic microphone to record the hidden sounds coming from electronic equipment, in this case a small room/cupboard at my work place which is both full of random junk and essential communications equipment.
I like the contrast of somewhere that is both a forgotten space that only a tiny handful of people ever set foot in, and somewhere that simultaneously has so much conversation flowing through it, albeit in a way that is normally silent and invisible.
Some of the sounds are quite harsh and abrasive, but some to me are more peaceful like waves lapping on a shore or background chatter.
Daniel Dearing
My thin place is my lovely little, rather overgrown backyard, which backs onto spring bank cemetery. It is a place i can relax in solitude, without being disturbed or over looked by neighbours, where i usually read and/or drink coffee. it is in dire need of much work which i always tell myself i will accomplish one day, although i struggle to find time with my rather demanding job...
Max Beadle
Title: 13395_recording_start_2023-11-11T11 11 47Z_13395.5kHz
This is a recording of a transmission on the Nov 11 at 11.11 2023.
The origin is a Russian military base in St Petersburg.
This is what is called a Number Station, a government shortwave transmission to be received by its operatives in another country and contains instructions or information to be decoded by their operatives/ spies/ government or military personnel.
You can access these via priyom.org/ a group dedicated to gather historical and current information on number stations and where possible present that in one comprehensive site, they list daily number station schedule transmissions and you can hear through their online radio.
This transmission has the name XPB and is a digital mode of the Russian 7 operator. All XPB schedules are twice weekly and consist of 6 identical transmissions 10 minutes apart. Each successive transmission is 1-2 MHz lower or higher in frequency. The frequencies are typically changed on a monthly basis.
The recording was collected on the day and the time of the Armistice 11th of the 11th (that commemorates the temporary cessation of fighting in the First World War). While we enter a space in time to acknowledge the barbarity of war and its horror upon those that are innocent in consequence, concurrently military decisions are propagated upon other nations through publicly accessible radio transmissions.
This Thin Space of point of decision from return is not possible points to remind us that the possession of power, individual or state exists in a narrow parameter and that transgression is a brief step.
The Image is called a Waterfall a pictorial spectrum display of the Shortwave Transmission showing the variance in signal.
The recording was via priyom.org/
David Priestman
Sounds gathered during a Mark Making workshop led by Annie Luke Turner in HARI during her Thin Places residency.
The place is the bus. The bus seems like a liminal space, an inbetween, an a to b. However it becomes something more through repetition and consistent branding from bus service. The orange of the stagecoach logo and interiors. The wheezing of suspension as you pull up to the next stop. These things remind me of old friends and connections, school friends making our first independent trips into the world, people I no longer see to places I no longer remember, maybe those places no longer exist because of redevelopment.
The bus doors because thin doors to the past.
Joe Foster
I think bus journeys are liminal spaces between a and b, a transitional betwixt and between state where you don't really belong anywhere. You're moving towards a destination.
Other people, strangers, share this state with you. You share a journey. Each exiting at different points.
Ziverna Murphy
Blackpool promenade in blustery weather felt like a thin place between town and sea, particularly with the mix of land and sea birds riding the thermals and calling out to each other - and the pedestrians below them.
Sarah Pennington
Dionne Ruffy
Recorded in Princes Ave Sainsburys, normally a full, crowded space. the sound the broken coffee machine made somehow changed that feeling, making it feel like a thin place to me, much less solid than before. for a second the shelves seemed less substantial.
Yol
My bathtub is a thin place. My bathtub is my refuge. It was where my shaking dog would go when she could hear fireworks. The tap is now broken and beyond repair, it runs 24/7. When you hear this, the bath tub will have been replaced with another. I hope the the thin place is more than my bathtub.
Linda Martin
Annie Morrad
Sounds gathered on a Thin 'Remnant' Walk, led by Freemetre. Water gushing from a tunnel under a road, and a new woodland with tall skinny trees between housing estate and railway line.
Standing in my unlit back yard, with fireworks exploding all around, near and far, it felt like a thin space of sanctuary within an encroaching war zone.
Reminded me of a detail from one of Annie Luke Turner's paintings.
Sarah Pennington
The recording is a walk along a thin line, a footpath, between the sea, the seashore, a railway line and suburban housing.
These 3 competing environments are separated by a narrow strip of land where colliding soundscapes, environmental characters and occupation by animals, insects, plant life, sea creatures and humans overlap.
Along this strip is the wreck of a 260 old Dutch East India cargo ship called the Amsterdam, imprisoned in the sand but visible at a very low tide (the ship floundered in a storm trying to enter the harbour that existed at Bulverhythe until it silted over several hundred years ago), and there is a submerged prehistoric forest which appears at low tide.
The coastal path is continually eroding with coastal drift and increasing storms and the sea threatens to overwhelm the coastal defences and once more take possession of the land, linking back into the river and floodplain.
Many of our human settlements exploiting the land, the water and wild life, are precariously perched like the one along this strip, continually shifting 'Thin Lines’
Mary Hooper
Sounds gathered whilst riding on the antique Carousel at the end of Blackpool's North Pier.
A place between sea and sky, and of childhood memory grasped at as the horses rotate around their axis, rising and falling.
Sarah Pennington
Event Artists & Running Order
Freemetre
Myles Noble
***
Jez riley French
CJ Pitcher
Millie Player
***
Lizzie King
Mads Borre
Mary Hooper
The event will be led by HARI with Pheobe riley Law, and will feature the work of Annie Luke Turner, plus discussions with the artists and field recording contributors - please join in with questions/comments.
