Weeks xxx Surfacing at Project DIVFUSE

I seem to have gotten a bit lost with dates, but have been wandering with microphones (including Jez Riley French microphones https://jezrileyfrench.co.uk) closer to home, and I am delighted to say that a piece I submitted to Project DIVFUSE for their open call for pieces based on field recordings was selected. It’s happening this weekend, 18/19/20 November and hopefully there’ll be a bit more info about it up on the gallery website soon: https://www.divfuse.com/index.php/category/current-upcoming/

The piece was inspried by sounds close to home. I live near the New River, a man-made artficial river in North London opened in 1613 to bring drinking water into the capital. One day I decided to drop a hydrophone into the water in the hope of hearing the underwater sounds of nature, and instead was surprised to hear the sound of tube trains at great volume. It made me wonder what London might sound like from different watery locations. This led to Surfacing, a collection of field recordings from London, made in the autumn of 2022. Each section of the piece consists of two recordings made at the same location, one with a hydrophone under the surface of a body of water collecting water-borne sounds, the other with a condenser microphone recording the ambient air-borne sounds. At times the two worlds appear closely connected in terms of their soundscape, and at others they appear to be worlds apart.