Whilst listening to this recording through your ears, listen also inside your ears to your own river.
Swirl and suck your spit-stream around your mouth, tongue, cheeks and throat, creating your own tides and eddies so that the outside expanse of sound is connected to the action inside your mouth.
Listen at a volume and/or through a device that best balances for you the inside/outside sounds.
This sound-work originated with an installation, From Source to Mouth, an aeolian harp of 7 strings, each 60 metres long, strung over Limehouse foreshore, so the wind and river had a voice, during the depth of Covid disquiet. The strings were partially ‘swallowed’ twice a day by the high tide and buffeted by gusts and breezes. In Aramaic, wind, breath and spirit are the same word.
The work was installed by Anne Bean and recorded and then composed by Nicol Parkinson.
During 2020, Anne Bean and Nicol Parkinson have been developing ideas towards collaborative work. The ‘between’ space they particularly share and dissect is the art/sound one, regarding it as more porous and interwoven than is acknowledged.
In a recently launched monograph on her work, Self Etc., the writer Dominic Johnson says: Anne Bean is a noted international figure who has been working actively since the 1960s. The art of Anne Bean makes strange our sense of time, memory, language, the body, and identity, particularly through solo and collaborative performances along a vital continuum between art and life.
Nicol Parkinson is exploring the spaces between improvisation and composition, action and document, performance and music. They’re slowly building a vocabulary of material, both visible and obscured, embracing flexibility of form and an attempt to avoid definition.