18 Feb Somasonicspirit

somasonicspirit by Simon Whitehead, Barnaby Oliver, Stirling Steward. photo © S Whitehead 2000

‘It was hot that day. In the glass-enclosed stairwell, one entered from the top and lowered oneself through strata of sound, the combined acoustics of sharply rippling water and an indecipherable, modulating technology-hum. Sunlight refracted in clear jars holding water and wet mosses, grasses and reeds. Nearby, but not visible, to the east, from sunrise to sunset, Simon Whitehead was walking Clougha Pike, the fells Hare Appletree, Rowton Brook and Black, listening, searching for the waterways under the crust of land, the gravity-drawn streams and the defiant, emergent springs.

Simon relayed the sounds of water by mobile phone to Barnaby Oliver, who, in the stairwell, projected those sounds through a system of cascading speakers … One felt as if deep inside the flow as the sounds became geological and evolved into a meditative harmonic texture’.

in Whitehead, Simon (2006). Walking to Work. Abercych: Shoeless, pp 84.