Furtlings

I’ve just come back from a visit to Rob’s over in Bowland, Lancashire. Driving the A59 as it scooped and rose through the moors, skirting the fells, my mind slipped once more into thinking of the connection between Aldborough and its Roman connections – the movement of people and materials that formed this strong east-west route. It seems somehow fitting that Rob and I trace this line back and forth as we delve to explore the site, and its temporal nods that echo back and forth across the landscape.

When Rob and I first started talking about Soundmarks, I was excited by the way in which our work intersected through attentive explorations of the relationships between people and landscape. We’d found quite different ways of focusing down and in, of furtling around in places, and playing with scale, with time. Now the project is underway, there’s an energy to this sense of discovery. Rob asks good questions. And he is a careful observer. Having him around isn’t just changing the way I think about my creative practice – how my visual art might respond to or work with sound – but it’s already making a huge difference to how I think of my archaeological practice too.  Some of the day to day aspects of the job, or ways in which as archaeologists we comb through and combine fragments of material, sediment, absence and suggested presence, suddenly seem expanded in possibilities, animated by a new perspective.

The project start was designed to coincide with our annual excavations on the site. Prior to this, Rob had been over back in the dead of winter, and we’d had a long walk as I told him about the geophysical surveys, pointed out barely visible changes in the topography. It was a walk that required imagination; so little of this rich archaeological site is really visible on the surface. So I was keen that in contrast to the cartographic, birds-eye view of the surveys, he had chance to see in and experience the vast depths of gathered life below our feet. The excavation allowed us to explore ideas of depth, and of time stratified – ideas that will reverberate through Soundmarks.

Meanwhile, Rob is helping me develop a new amplitude of sound; or rather, of listening. It began with a series of podcasts we were making about the dig. I would gather recordings, and at the end of the week send them to Rob to work his magic and whittle the narrative flow. The result was that, more than ever, I was thinking about how we piece together evidence to create our hypotheses, how we story the trench. I began thinking about what sounds made that very specific place, or defined particular actions.

This became honed when Rob came to site with all his sound kit: his bag of tricks. Seeing him standing on site with his binaural microphones cloaked in big ear-warmer fluff, reminded me of the BFG, listening to the deafening sound of a ladybird walking over a leaf. He was tuned in. And he allowed me to tune in too. One evening we went back to site and began connecting up contact mic’s to the various tools we use on site: mattock, trowel, shovel. We would try something out for a bit, then shift the microphones, or try a different patch of ground, a new rhythm or technique. An action like mattocking is already one which I am tuned into for sound – I am guided by the sound of densities, coarseness, gritty materiality of as the blade moves through the ground. But in the midst of this action, Rob slotted the headphones over my ears. Whoosh. Every little peck of resistence on the metal rang out, the smoother cut of sandy silts become thick with sound. This took archaeological attentiveness to the earth up a notch, thrusting it into surround-sound thick with bass materiality.

Over at Rob’s the adventures in sound continued. He showed me various analogue and digital modes of sorting, sifting and fragmenting sound; zooming in and in until the smallest fleck of noise became a world ripe for exploration. We started off listening to some of his tape loops, where elements of the landscape had begun a magnetic erosion, so that the repeating sound gradually lost parts of itself, become a frail whisper of its former self. Then to the digital. Rob explained granular synthesis, a sampling of micro-sounds, or grains of sound, which can then be captured and layered to create a new sound world. These scaled modes of selection and reconstruction echoed the very heart of archaeological practice.

But perhaps my favourite sound-furtling was with Iota, a granular sampling patch in the Max for Live program. Here, a visual stratigraphy of the sound clip was displayed, and we were able to select blocks of tone to repeat, invert, layer up. It echoed a scene from the end of the dig, when our geo-archaeologist, Charly French, took a series of cores from the section. His rectangular blocks would reveal thick detail about the soils and action of a timeframe reduced to a few years rather than a few centuries. Likewise, these blocks of layered sound allowed an attentiveness to a tiny moment in a great expanse of noise. This was a process of concentration, of getting lost in beat and bass.