The following was given as an introduction to my performance at Kings Place with composer Matthew Sansom:

“Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive than the eye and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumblings and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping of flags”

So wrote Luigi Russolo in the Art of Noises in the first part of the last century. He claimed for the city an excitement of competing sounds, heard in these noises the beauty of progress, of man against nature. This was the futurist project, their world view.

But over the years noise became something different. Listen now to Canadian composer R Murray Schafer writing in the 1970’s…

“Listen to the sky.  The whirring and scraping against the air is nothing but the wounds of a crippled imagination made audible”

From an acoustic symbol of progress to be celebrated, from the modern, it became an acoustic symbol of power and of the ills of the world, something to be abated, banished in a return to a quieter, simpler time. 

Part of me, the environmentalist perhaps, has a lot of time for Schafer. I want to be able to hear myself think, to hear my footsteps, to hear robins and wrens. I live in the country, and spend a lot of time on Dartmoor, a place where the sounds of rivers and the breeze around its granite tors, of its birds and animals, provide a deep healing from all the business of the world, a place where you can loose yourself.

But part of me cannot deny, like a guilty pleasure, the excitement of a passing Chinook with the ominous thud of its slow beating blades, a sound as unique as skylarks song. Or the lonely sound of a distant single propeller airplane. Or a the shearing sound of a car in rain racing along the high moor from Warren House to Princetown.

These are as much the sound of Dartmoor as the flowing rivers. To want to deny them, to want to somehow put them in brackets, to value or judge them less or more than other noises, to me, limits my senses and my engagement with the world AS IT IS.

Unlike Russolo, unlike Schafer, in my work with sound, I want to try and be open to the sounds without judgment, without making them represent anything else, and as John Cage suggested, to “let the sounds be themselves”

I’m want to encourage and give other people the opportunity to do this to. I find, in my work with young people, that once you’ve suggested listening is a pleasure in itself, they start to listen. And listen with a delightful openness. And hear things they have never, consciously considered before, whether in be the ultra mundane sound of the school photocopier, or the chattering of starlings around the playground.

Where does this lead? What’s its purpose?

To me, that’s missing the point. Purposes come after. If you don’t like the noises, work to alter them, if you like the noises, work to encourage them.

Do what you will.

My interest is in purpose-less primacy of listening; of giving the world an extra sensory dimension. Above all it’s about being a human with ears to hear.

The work that Matthew and myself have produced is our response to the sounds here around Kings Cross. I would argue, if you’ve been following me, that what you will experience are distinctly NOT the actual sounds of Kings Cross, they are representations, mine in words, Matthew’s in the form of a digital recording.

They are in my opinion, no replacement for going out and listening yourself, doing your own soundwalk, or arranging a soundwalk with others. What I would hope though,is that what you read and what you hear simply encourages you to think about sound, and our relationship to it so that, as soon as you leave the building today, you’ll perhaps hear a few new things.

As mentioned, my contribution is the text that you’ll see, a personal written response to time spent simply listening to the area.  Matthew will talk about his work with field recordings in a moment.

If you choose to read the words, I’d suggest you don’t read any deep meaning in them, there is non. They are just words I chose to represent the sounds I was hearing and occasionally the sounds I imagined, with the odd reflection on their impact on me as I listened.

Matthew and I worked separately. What was written and what was recorded therefore reflect what our ears were drawn to. Put together here for the first time, the words and sounds will at times agree, at other times they will disagree. – you’ll be reading one thing and hearing another. This was as much a surprise for me as it it will be for you! I make no apology for this, I’ve always had a soft spot for the role of chance in creative endeavor.