The Listening Room 

Friday, 22 April 2022

Time: 14:00-20:00 (looped playback) 

Location: London College of Communication (LCC), Performance Lab (Mb108)

** This is an internal event for UAL Staff and Students only **

For Earth Day 2022, the LCC BA Sound Arts course will host a one-off listening room featuring soundworks from staff and researchers at the college. Installed as a playback film for the ears, you are invited into a mixture of human, animal, technological and environmental sounds across artistic works that explore atmospheric transmissions, more-than-human worlds, wind turbines, geosonics, data centers and more. 

Featuring works by LCC staff and students:  

May the Future Keep its Core: Fari Bradley (PhD researcher at CRiSAP, London College of Communication). Produced as part of a limited vinyl (Systems for a Score), the work is a result of collaborations with UAE-based musicians, artists and school children, improvising and interpreting traditional Emirati weave (Al Sadu) as graphic scores. 

Decoys: Angus Carlyle and Mark Peter Wright (CRiSAP Members, London College of Communication). An experimental foley (post-production sfx) artwork that propels listening towards a scorched earth scenario in which a more-than-human figure navigates the landscape. Published on limited vinyl by multi.modal recordings.  

From a Wind Turbine to Vultures (And Back): Kate Carr (PhD researcher at CRiSAP, London College of Communication). Born out of a residency at Joya arte ecologia in Velez Blanco (southern Spain) the work presents a sonic transect (line) of a mountain’s technocultural ecology. 

Searching for Sferics: Hannah Kemp-Welch (PhD researcher at CRiSAP, London College of Communication). Made during a residency at Full of Noises (Barrow-in-Furness, UK) in September 2021, Hannah built a series of antennas to pick up the Earth’s natural static: capturing lightning and atmospheric disturbances around Cumbria, UK. 

KEF 201C: Matt Parker (Former PhD researcher at CRiSAP, London College of Communication). An unedited ‘walkthrough’ field recording of a data centre that was, at the time (2016), the largest blockchain facility in Europe, in Iceland. 

Peat Song: Julia Schauerman (incoming PhD researcher at CRiSAP, London College of Communication). A work that invites us into the sonic world of peat bogs – vital carbon sinks for the earth – composed here across voice, soundscape and modes of storytelling. 

10 Billion (Binaural Excerpt): Adam Stanovic (Programme Director for Sound and Music). The United Nations recently predicted that the world population will exceed ten billion by the year 2050. If this prediction is correct, a staggering population boom will occur over the coming thirty years, at a rate never previously witnessed by mankind. This piece responds to the mind-boggling number, ten billion, by giving it a sonic form. Each tiny microsound, or grain, represents one person and, taken as a whole, they number ten billion.  

Here We All Are (Lucier Mix): Cathy Lane (CRiSAP Director, London College of Communication). For a long time I’ve been thinking of what a feminist re-working of Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” might sound like. I wanted to see what happened when my voice was looped over and over again into the outside world so that it combined with the sounds of the other people and the other species that I share space with. This piece presents recordings that were made during the start of UK lockdown due to C19 (March-April 2020). They were made while sitting in the same position in my garden in Hackney, London. 

Switch Off: Rory Salter (Sound Arts Technician). For a non-sounding Earth Day intervention, Rory invites us to consider switching off electrical usage, across the whole of UAL, for one day. 

Thanks for Listening. 

BA (Hons) Sound Arts and CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Art Practice) 

London College of Communication