To hear on Sunday 21 and 28 September 2014, 2pm - 9pm:
Sweet Airs
(2014, Premiere)
by Cathy Lane
Cathy Lane on 'Sweet Airs':
The wind is responsible for so many things in the Hebrides (remote islands off the west coast of Scotland). It hardly ever stops blowing. It has many characters and is accompanied by all kinds of other weather conditions. For a sound artist and composer making recordings in the islands the wind can be a curse, but it is more often a delightful carrier of the voices of people, animals, birds and things. These airborne sounds often come from far away, their source hidden from view, mysterious like the ‘sweet airs’ of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest - the sounds of a birthday party far across the island; sheep roaming the cliffs; people singing hymns together in a house; cows waiting to board the ferry to be sold on the mainland; snippets of a church service and the cries of different birds. The wind also has its own voices and activates the songs of other objects - gates, plants, leaves, fences. The wind is an accompaniment to all aspects of life on these unique islands.
Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and researcher.
Her current interests include how sound relates to the past, our histories, our environment and our collective and individual memories; composing with the spoken word; field recording; listening; and how feminism and gender are manifested within sound art. Aspects of her creative practice have developed out of these interests and include composition and installation-based work with spoken word, field recordings and archive material.
Books include Playing with Words: The Spoken Word in Artistic Practice (RGAP, 2008) and, with Angus Carlyle, In the Field (Uniformbooks, 2013), a collection of interviews with eighteen contemporary sound artists who use field recording in their work and On Listening (2013) a collection of commissioned essays about some of the ways in which listening is used in different disciplines. Her CD The Hebrides Suite was released by Gruenrekorder in 2013.
Cathy Lane is Professor of Sound Arts at University of the Arts London and co-directs Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP).