A Quiet Reverie| IMT Gallery

Disturbing the Night

Swale & Rye

AUDIO - Sennheiser ME66 | River Rye

Wood

Keepers of the Abbey - Reprise

Riveaulx is home to hundreds of doves, again they watch and brood over proceedings...

Their wings and calls resonate the space...

They nest in the 'Choir' - today they are the voice of the Abbey.

Labyrinths

Aural Architecture

Advancing from open air into a carved out frame in a wall at Easby Abbey - approx 30 cms x 30cms. What did it used to be?

AUDIO-Binaural Recording | head in wall

Compositional Strategy

An example below of the written structure and process for recording and composition. Exploring the Abbey rooms themselves as a type of aural architecture and also a method referring to Dunn's temporal listening, in that what is present and imagined.

Warming House:
Whilst the warming-house was used by the monks to warm themselves, the heat meant that this was an appropriate place for scribes to prepare ink for their parchment and where shoes could be greased. Bloodletting, a restorative treatment that each monk received four times a year, was also carried out here.


Imagined sounds:
Fire & Dripping

These imagined sounds will bring a tactility and a narrative focus to the tracks, interacting with the underlying palette of spacial drones.

Singing for Salmon

Abbeys were more often than not located on the banks of secluded rivers and water ways. The river would become a vital source for the monks, not only for its fish and livestock, but its continual prescence and force. Sonically the river can be heard at all times in Easby, it's transient nature heightening the sense of time - what remains and what has past.

Monks were meant to observe silence in the church and claustral area, any necessary information was conveyed by making signs with their hands. To make the sign for fish the monk used his hand to mimic the motion of the fish's tail in water.

AUDIO- Rode NT4 Recording|Wailing River

Sonic Ghosts

'Haunting is historical, to be sure, but it is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of the calendar .' Jaques Derrida, Spectres of Marx.

Derrida suggests that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history will begin to orient itself towards ideas and aesthetics that are thought of as rustic, bizarre or "old-timey"; that is, towards the "ghost" of the past. At a recent seminar on sound & hauntology the 'crackle' was discussed as a mode or tool for evoking potential sonic ghosts, phantasms or spectres in sound and music. Easby Abbey is full of sonic ghosts and also its own natural crackle...


AUDIO-Binaural Recording|Rain Crackle
AUDIO-Binaural Recording|Rain Crackle Variation

Keepers of the Abbey

AUDIO-Binaural Recording|Sleeping Keepers



AUDIO-Binaural Recording|Winged Keepers



The Doves at Easby Abbey are by far the most present force now at the site. They fly through corridors and narrow passages today like perhaps they did when the monks lived there? One white dove in particular elegantly broods over the proceedings, I can't but think of the 'White Monks' that used to live and share this place. They (the doves) are firmly imbeded into the architecture, roosting inside the walls and sounding their calls throughout the structures bones. It feels like they are watching you, like somehow this is their home and always has been - past, present, and future they are the keppers of the Abbey.

Sound Transfusion

Connect-transfer-merge-bleed...


Relocate-reinvent-replace-reinvigorate...


A sonic gesture.

Temporal States of Listening

'Non Linear interpenetration of time states that is impossible to make through sound making'. David Dunn, Site of Sound.

Writing as an aural mode of observation. The act of listening not only to what is now but of imagined sounds from past and future. Below are the temporal sound observations from my field trip to Easby Abbey. It is interesting to see certain elements connecting over the three states of listening.

Vesch

A 'thing' or object with a soul, not exactly a souvenir or memorabilia but something infused with personality through its history and its personal meaning. Above are mementoes from Easby Abbey, objects that pertain the sites history and soul.

Outlet

Bloodletting was a preventative and restorative treatment frequently administered during the Middle Ages. It was thought to restore balance to the body, to sharpen the senses and clear the brain; it was also believed to produce a musical voice, to promote longevity and quench sexual desire. Bloodletting in Cistercian abbeys, as in other religious houses, was a routine part of life. As a matter of course monks were bled several times a year, to keep them in optimum health; those who were ill might then receive extra bleedings to restore them to health. The monks were bloodlet in batches at least four times a year – February, April, June and September. There was to be no bloodletting at harvest, when everyone was needed to help in the fields, or at feasts when the entire community was expected to participate in all the services.

Fountains

The Abbey ruins at Fountains are the largest monastic ruins in the country. Set in the naturally beautiful Skell valley, flanked by two vast expanses of lawned grass with cliff faces to either side, and with the river Skell running through and under the abbey – the weight of time and memory are tied to the ruins and the earth it stands upon.


History - The early years
A dispute and riot at St Mary's Abbey in York led to the founding of Fountains Abbey in 1132. After pleading unsuccessfully to return to the early 6th century Rule of St Benedict, 13 monks were exiled and taken into the protection of Thurstan, Archbishop of York.

He provided them with a site in the valley of the little River Skell in which they could found a new, more devout monastery. Although described as a place "more fit for wild beasts than men to inhabit" it had all the essential materials for the creation of a monastery: shelter from the weather, stone and timber for building, and plenty of water.

Within three years, the little settlement at Fountains had been admitted to the austere Cistercian Order (founded in France in 1098). Under its rules they lived a rigorous daily life, committed to long periods of silence, a diet barely above subsistence level, and wore the regulation habit of coarse undyed sheep's wool (underwear was forbidden), which earned them the name "White Monks."

One of the Abbey's most important developments was the introduction of the Cistercian system of lay brothers. They were usually illiterate and relieved the monks from routine jobs, giving them more opportunity to dedicate their time to God.


The Cellarium
Amazingly the cellarium roof has remained intact and the lay brothers ate, slept and socialised here, beneath the incredible vaulted ceiling which escaped Henry VIII’s brutal sixteenth century dissolution of the abbeys.

Today the inhabitants are protected species of bat who live in the ceiling nooks and only come out after dusk. It is estimated there are over eight species of bats living in the cellarium.

The Cloisters
Once used for meditation and exercise by the monks the cloisters formed the centre of the abbey and many rooms lead off from this area, including the warming room where you can still see the huge fireplace.

Above the warming room up the external staircase to the left, is the muniments room where the monks kept all their important documents, it made sense to keep them above the warming room so the documents stayed dry in all seasons.



1200 - 1539
By the middle of the 13th century it was one of England's richest religious houses and, as well as farming, was mining lead, working iron, quarrying stones and horse breeding. But the seeds of failure lay in the very success of the system. The lay brothers encouraged the monks to extend their estates beyond what was necessary for monastic self-sufficiency.

In the 14th century economic collapse followed bad harvests and Scots raids, and the Black Death exacerbated the effects of financial mismanagement. The community of lay brothers reduced in size, many of the monastic granges were leased out to tenant farmers, and in the late 15th century dairy farming replaced sheep farming.

Despite its financial problems, Fountains Abbey remained of considerable importance in the Cistercian Order. The abbots sat in Parliament and the abbacy of Marmaduke Huby (1495-1526) marked a period of revival.

Fountains once again flourished, but its life was brought to an abrupt end in 1539 by Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries. The abbot (Marmaduke Bradley) received a pension of £100 pa, his prior received £8, and 30 monks each received £6.

For a few months after the Dissolution, the Abbey buildings stood empty in the hope of being the site for the cathedral for a new Dales bishopric.

This was not to be, and by 1540 glass and lead from the dismantling of Fountains had found their way to Ripon and York.
The buildings and parts of the estate were sold to Sir Richard Gresham, whose family subsequently sold them on to Stephen Proctor, the builder of Fountains Hall.

Then the abbey passed through several hands until it came into the possession of the Messenger family. In 1767 it was sold for £18,000 to William Aislabie, who landscaped the abbey ruins as a picturesque folly to be viewed from the Water Garden.

Space & Time Scars

‘Physical places are vital sources of metaphors for our social constructions of reality…Our perception of reality is defined by metaphor’.
Sheldrake, Spaces for the Sacred.

The meaning of place is created by stories, myth, rituals, history and in naming. Ruins are places of incomplete presence, allowing the individual the ability to engage and to some extent, complete the place with their own imaginings. It has been widely discussed that we have become distant from nature and in todays technological age its serves more as an abstraction. To over compensate we often romantise nature and objectify it, such a reaction is born out of a deep anxiety and guilt.

Sites like Rievaulx and Fountains have a deep rooted history, tied to the land, ritual, solitude. Yet they clearly are not romantic – these are places of turbulance, places of rupture where people have been physically removed from the land. ‘Suppression of the Monasteries’ or ‘Dissolution of the Monastries’ was the formal process between 1536 and 1541 by which Henry VIII removed the monastic communities and confiscated property. These scars hold heavy ressonace and metophor as today the sites are ruins and on one hand devoid of life, yet clearly in this state of ruin something still exists…

Questions

How can 'site' be transferred?
How does soundscape composition fit into sound art?
How can sound express a narrative?
When does an environmental recording become music?
How do we represent a sonic space?

Teaching a Stone to Talk

'You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it; there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it; this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep-just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds; they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression; instead it's all there is.'

Annie Dillard

Peregrini

Longing to achieve correspondence between belief and place, between inner and outer landscapes.

All human life is seen as an exile..