Kinterbury Creek Community Soundscape Project

In January I started work with a community arts project on the Barne Barton housing estate in Plymouth. The project, called BBRoots, is about looking at what is unique about the area, capturing it, celebrating it and using it to raise aspirations for the estate. My part of the project involves giving people the opportunity to listen to, record, and talk about Kinterbury Creek - a green space within the community that leads down to the Tamar Estuary. So far we have held a couple of informal Saturday morning sessions and a drop in event at the local community centre.

Some of the sounds collected so far can be heard here:

Arts Wave Devon sound art drop in day

Arts Wave Devon is an arts project supporting people to discover and engage with their own creativity and improve their wellbeing. The project works with communities to design a varied programme of opportunities, with a particular focus towards supporting groups working with children and young people, older people and people with disabilities.

On 1st of Feb I ran a sound art "drop-in" day for Arts Wave Devon to give people the opportunity to work with a variety of recording equipment and microphones to improvise and record with a variety of objects. This was inspired by my own work recording improvisations with natural materials and recent collaborations with American sound artist Jeph Jerman.

Recording Quiet Places: Interview for British Library Blog

There's an interview with me talking about Very Quiet Records over on the British Library Sound and Vision blog here. Thanks to Cheryl Tipp for asking!

Review of Bellever Quiet Walk

Nice review of the Bellever Quiet Walk from poet Tony Lopez ...

Friday evening, 26th April, Sara and I went on the Aune Head Arts Quiet Walk number 1, led by Sound Artist and Naturalist Tony Whitehead, 7.30pm to 10.30pm at Bellever Forest, just a mile south of Postbridge in the middle of Dartmoor. In the evening light we walked and ambled up woodland tracks near the Youth Hostel, taking plenty of time to stop and listen to the sounds of Dartmoor. It was a treat almost right away to hear our first cuckoo of the year in the distance at first, then it flew close by and continued to call. We saw a roe deer very close and heard chaffinches, wrens, blackbirds, greenfinches, sparrows, woodpigeons, songthrushes, goldcrests and other quite ordinary birds - but we really took time to listen and to hear all the calls. Higher up in a clearing we waited and listened for fifteen or twenty minutes for the last of the evening songbirds, and when the air changed as the light faded a songthrush's extraordinary repeated variations were echoed across the valley way into the distance.


     Then we walked higher up towards Bellever Tor on the forest track in among a group of about twenty Dartmoor ponies, snorting and munching, tearing at the grass. As it grew really dark we saw the first planets, Saturn and Mars, coming into view, and then the mass of stars. It was very cold when we stopped on a high ridge and saw a red glow in the distance that turned into a red full moon rising over the moor, the colour draining out as it lifted higher in the sky. Then we walked down a steep rocky path by torchlight back to the Bellever Forest car park and drove back through Moretonhampstead and Dunsford to Exmouth. What an amazing experience and great company, thanks to Tony Whitehead and Aune Head Arts.

http://t-lopez.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/quiet-walk-on-dartmoor.html

Bellever Quiet Walk

26 April 2013, Bellever Forest, Dartmoor, Devon.

Last night seven of us sat in silence in Bellever Forest and listened to the day's last song thrush sing as the sun set. Although it was alone, its voice echoed off the far slope of the valley; a duet of one. Then we walked up onto the top of the ridge by the tor and watched the full moon rise. The simplest things. 

Review of first Quiet Walk

Photo: Richard Povall

This was not intended to be a strenuous walk, the kind of walk that will always warm you up, but a ‘quiet walk’, a walk focussed on listening and being open and aware – on being, in fact. 

A lovely review of our first Quiet Walk by Richard Povall on his Start Bay Blog here.

Newbridge Quiet Walk

At just before dawn this morning seven of us set off on the first Quiet Walk organised by Very Quiet Records and Aune Head Arts. We followed Devon's River Dart upstream on to the edge of Dartmoor. Following days of rain the river was in spate, and quite impressive. The recording below, the first in a series that will document these walks, presents 60 minutes of fast flowing tumbling river as it runs through a deep valley on the edge of Dartmoor. Its static, white noise, but full of complexity and some rather impressive lower frequencies.