Sound Camp at Octopus
Starts: 12am Sat 2nd
Ends: 9am Sun 3rd May 2015
Piel View House and locations around Barrow-in-Furness
Book a free place here (booking is essential)
Join Octopus at their Barrow Park studio for a day and night of field recording and sound based activities. Directed by the acts of listening and sound gathering, artists Lee Patterson and Helmut Lemke will lead trips to Walney and/or Piel Island and within Barrow Park, to explore how we communicate and share the heard environment. As part of a series of outdoor listening events on International Dawn Chorus Day, we will also be streaming the dawn chorus live from the park between 5am and 6am, linking to Reveil: a 24 hour broadcast of the sounds of daybreak, relayed live by audio streamers around the globe. Plenty of food and drink will be provided as well as space to pitch a tent or indoor camp.
Schedule: Sat 2nd May
12 noon – Arrive at Piel View House for lunch and an informal introduction to the artists and the rest of the group.
13:00 – Short presentation from Lee and Helmut on their work.
13:45 – Depart for a field trip to Walney or Piel Island. Sturdy footwear and wet weather clothing recommended.
14:00 – 17:30 – Field trip led by Lee Patterson, Helmut Lemke and Octopus. A number of audio recorders will be available to borrow, but feel free to bring a notebook, audio recorder, camera or smart phone if you have one.
18:00 – Arrive back at Piel View House / evening meal.
19:30 – Look at Reveil and connect with other camps around the world. Setting up broadcasting tent in Piel View grounds and testing the stream as a group.
20:30 – Sharing and working with audio / visual material to create a record of the field trip for later broadcast.
22:30 – 00:00 – Capturing and streaming the sounds of the studio and the park at night.
Sun 3rd May
00:00 – 4:00 – Sleep or carry on recording / editing / streaming / discussing. Bring a sleeping bag and / or a small tent.
4:00 – Meet in the studio grounds to prepare for Reveil stream.
5:00 – 6:00 – Stream the dawn chorus as part of Reveil.
7:00 – 9:00 Breakfast / pack down.
Reveil starts in Rotherhithe near the Greenwich Meridian and travels West from one open microphone to the next, following the wave of sound that loops the earth with the rising sun, picking up audio feeds from forest cams, very low frequency receivers, deep ocean hydrophones, space radio stations, and a network of soundcamps and streamers, in a sequence lasting one earth day.
Each soundcamp will be set up in a unique location, where visitors can take part in artist led activities that turn the site into a broadcasting and listening point, and explore the local sound ecology through workshops and dawn walks and by camping out overnight.
About the artists:
Working across various forms, including improvised music, field recording, film soundtrack and installation, Lee Patterson attempts to understand his surroundings through different ways of listening. Characterised by revealing subliminal and barely audible sound materials within commonplace things, his unorthodox approach to generating sound has led to collaborations with a host of international artists and musicians including Phil Minton, Michel Doneda, Louisa Martin and Rhodri Davies; Bouy with Paul Vogel and Phil Durrant, and Terrain with Graham Halliwell.
Hear some of Lee’s work here and here.
Since the 1970’s Helmut Lemke has developed site-specific concerts, performances and installations. His endeavours have taken him to concert halls and outdoor markets, to Galleries and Museums and to the frozen seas off Greenland, to Function Rooms of Pubs and to International Festivals. He has presented his work all over the globe, collaborating with other Sound Artists and Musicians, with Dancers and Scientists, Visual Artists and Architects, Poets and Archaeologists, Performance Artists and Wildlife Rangers. He has experienced many audible sounds as well as those made audible through creative interventions, and fundamentally come to understand the site the sound requires.
Helmut Lemke website: website ‘sound-art.de’ / link to page on sound collection and sharing.
About Barrow-in-Furness:
At the tip of the Furness peninsula, Barrow’s landscape is a mixture of the industrial and the coastal, situated close to the Lake District and bordered by Morecambe Bay, the Duddon Estuary and the Irish Sea, as well as one of the highest concentrations of off-shore wind turbines in the world.Our location is diverse and deeply unusual and many of our activities have attempted to draw out some of the peculiarities and hidden aspects of the local landscape. Using our studio in the park as a base, we will explore one or more of the nearby Islands and coastal areas including Walney and Piel. With its wide sandy beaches, salt-marshes, shingle, sand dunes and ponds, Walney is home to a wide variety wildlife including natterjack toads, a number of migratory birds, rare gulls and eider ducks. Piel (just visible from our studio kitchen) is just 50 acres and home to the “King” of Piel, by tradition the landlord of the island’s public house, the Ship Inn.
For any other information, contact: info_at_octopuscollective.org
