Listening to the city: Mapping Manchester’s Quiet Spaces on International Dawn Chorus Day

After a long winter, the first sign I noticed that the seasons were changing was the regularity with which I was awoken at unsociable hours by the dawn chorus in the trees outside my window, loud enough to break through my sleep and punctuate my dreams, before finally waking me fully.

The rhythm and routine of bird call as part of city life, and the way in which it might coexist with or be altered by birds’ close proximity to humans in urban environments, is something that interests artist Rae Story. She has spent nearly a year working with Manchester arts group St Luke’s on a participatory project mapping the quiet spaces of the city; one of her long-held ambitions has been to bring people together to listen to a dawn chorus in a publicly accessible green space.

An appropriate park or garden in which to gather participants safely and discreetly in the depths of night eluded her – until she was introduced to the Parrs Wood Environmental Centre, a hidden green space on the edges of Didsbury. Situated on the southern outskirts of Manchester, where the city meets the River Mersey on the boundary of Cheshire, the site could easily be missed. Although it forms part of a ‘green corridor’ of woodland and riverside paths that provide a pleasant off-road walking and cycling route between Stockport and south Manchester’s suburbs, the entrance is sandwiched between the nondescript architecture of a chain hotel and a huge multi-use leisure complex of the type that often characterise busy arterial routes.

Parrs Wood Environmental Centre has a long history as an educational outdoor space for the city’s children. Founded in the years immediately following the Second World War, and run for many years by the city council, school classes were given their own plots to tend. The site also provided adult education through the Workers’ Educational Association.

Initially part of a country estate, with the former stables, walled kitchen garden and gardener’s cottage still in evidence, the centre is now part of Parrs Wood High School, but continues to offer adults and children environmental education under the guidance of volunteers.

On International Dawn Chorus Day, fifteen of us meet shortly before 4am under a bright lopsided, yellow-tinged moon, sitting low in the sky. Although it’s been a balmy day the grass is sodden with dew; my summer plimsolls are quickly soaked through.

We’re led through an overgrown path in the woods to a clearing encircled by overturned logs which double as benches, and invited to forget everything else for the next forty minutes in order to focus fully on what we hear in the air surrounding us.

As the birds call from all sides, under a densely curtained canopy of leaves, it feels like we’re experiencing theatre in the round, in some kind of natural performance tent, the performers unseen. As time goes by, birds enter and leave, and come back; the low-toned call of the wood pigeon is a late entry against a patter of higher pitched trills. Although, we hear the occasional car on the road outside and the rumble of a lone night train, this is the birds’ space and time. Two sirens go past, shifting in and out of the chorus, which continues regardless.

I’m listening intently, in a way I’m not used to. My sense of smell becomes more acute, too; there’s a definite aroma of the warm, earthy smell of horses and, later, the sweet scent of crabapple blossom. It slowly grows lighter; perhaps our senses are adjusting, too.

What I feel most acutely, though, is my own illiteracy when it comes to knowledge of birds or the natural world. I can’t even find the words to describe the calls I’ve heard, in order to ask which birds they might belong to.

Mapping Manchester’s Quiet Spaces is a project by the artist Rae Story with St Luke’s Arts Project. A celebration event, with presentations from the workshops, will be held at Elizabeth Gaskell’s House on Tuesday 26 June at 3pm and 6pm. For more information about this and other events visit www.mappingmanchestersquietspaces.org.

Transmitting the outskirts: LoneLady's Scrub Transmissions

It's often too easy to conflate place with music, and vice versa. It's tempting to view a city through a lens of its cultural production, to hold on to a static image of past achievements and overlook the ways in which places, and their culture, continue to evolve. It's also easy to reduce an artist to their urban identity, to limit them to an artistic lineage that is geographically - and therefore to some extent always arbitrarily - defined.

There is a sense of LoneLady trying to break out of these boxes, to get away from a very particular - and often male - Mancunian identity. Yet at the same time, her music is undeniably shaped by Manchester. It's the place where she grew up, on the eastern fringes of the city. It's also where her two albums to date were written, rehearsed and recorded, in largely self-built rehearsal and studio spaces in former industrial units in isolated areas outside of the city centre. Until recent acquisitions by developers capitalising on Manchester's property boom, apparently redundant buildings such as these, surrounded by half-demolished buildings, light industrial activity or red light districts, were available and affordable to artists due to their relative geographical and cultural remoteness. Despite their uncertainty of tenure, artists became used to coexisting with damp, cold, mice and indifferent landlords, fashioning and reinventing these spaces to fit their needs and finding the space and freedom for invention and experimentation amidst physical decrepitude. These were the places where most of Manchester's real creative work was done.

LoneLady both acknowledges this geographical specificity in her work and attempts to break away from it; most recently, she's stretched her wings with a long-term residency at Somerset House in London. As a Mancunian woman, she sees herself not just as struggling for visibility within the mainstream music world, but also as an outsider to the city itself. She situates herself both physically and metaphorically on the edges of Manchester, and outside of the myths manufactured by those who wish to shape our perceptions of it.

LoneLady wants us to share and understand the mundane places and subtle experiences which influence her sensations of the city day-to-day, and her place within it, as a place that is lived in, worked in and travelled through, and as a city that - far from the promotional spiel of business, tourism, redevelopment and economic growth - continues to be uncertain, often difficult and sometimes unwelcoming for those who exist outside of its dominant uses and narratives.

Far from the shininess and spectacle of city centre redevelopment, LoneLady tries to tell us different stories and show us other cultural landmarks. In 2012, she invited us to plug our headphones in and experience her music in the context of 1960s elevated motorway the Mancunian Way, through her temporary installation The Utilitarian Poetic, which embedded a previously unreleased track beneath a flyover on the outskirts of the city centre. TUP drew our attention to a structure that is a permanent presence in the city, yet which is almost always experienced in transit, and a place where few stop to linger. Removing fast-flowing traffic from the city's roads, the Mancunian Way flyover distances motorists from the city at ground level, yet it also creates a constant background hum for those who live and work in the estates and buildings alongside it.

Six years later, LoneLady again asks us to turn our back on the city centre and to venture east to the inner-city neighbourhood of Miles Platting, an area that borders Clayton on one side and Ancoats on the other, on the banks of the Ashton Canal. East Manchester, a former industrial and mining district, where Clayton is situated, remains one of the poorest areas of Manchester, despite the new sporting facilities built for the Commonwealth Games in 2002. By contrast, Ancoats, which borders the hip Northern Quarter area of Manchester city centre, has, in just a few years, become unrecognisable. As derelict former factories and mills have been converted, alongside infill apartment blocks, a previously under-visited area of the city has been filled with bars, shops and restaurants catering to young professionals, and is regularly featured in local and national media as a 'foodie destination'. 

New-build flats are gradually encroaching further into east Manchester, following the improved access to the city brought by the building of the East Manchester tram line. However, in spite of its proximity to Ancoats and Manchester city centre, Miles Platting feels like a different world entirely. Here, we see and hear different uses for the city, which don't fit comfortably elsewhere: families gather in special dress in small sections of industrial units repurposed as places of worship; graffiti artists find ample space to exhibit their work. There's also evidence of others left behind by the city's redevelopment, including rough sleeping and heroin use, on wasteland exposed by the demolition of former industrial buildings.

There's also a atmosphere of openness and space here, lacking in a city centre that is increasingly embracing height and density - of a place that is yet to be rediscovered and rebuilt. Into this left-behind landscape, embedded in a tower of rubble, LoneLady has inserted 'Little Fugue', an unreleased track from 2014. Behind you are the skeletal outlines of abandoned gas towers. In front and to the side are patched up industrial buildings, some missing windows, and subdivided for a variety of commercial and creative uses. In the background, plodding indie rock competes across the canal with band practice emanating from a facing building. Through the headphones, LoneLady's guitar chimes gothically over a synthy, dancey track that both suggests something of her city's heritage, but shows it is possible to do something new and different with it.

Then we hear a voiceover, a story about what this area has meant to her. It concludes by urging us to: "Hear the voices of the landscape, before they're scrubbed out."

Scrub Transmissions went live on Sunday 18 February and continues until the battery runs out (duration dependent on weather conditions!). For map and further information, visit http://lonelady.co.uk/blog/scrub-transmissions-miles-platting. 

An accompanying 'zine by LoneLady is available from the Peer Hat and Piccadilly Records in the Northern Quarter.

Delia Derbyshire Day 2013 at Band on the Wall

With its futuristic bleeping, mysterious whooshing, ominous organ and chugging guitars gearing up to transport the viewer into a different world, the theme tune made for the Dr Who series in 1963 is one of the most distinctive, evocative and appropriate pieces of music ever created for television, and it still forms the basis of the theme tune used today. Long attributed solely to composer Ron Grainer, the contribution made by sound pioneer Delia Derbyshire, a member of the innovative BBC Radiophonic Workshop, has often been overlooked – but now a Manchester-based group, dubbing themselves 'Delia Darlings', are to celebrate her work and legacy with a mini-symposium at Band on the Wall, timed to coincide with the 50th birthday of the series. The Delia Darlings – contemporary classical composer Ailís Ní Ríain, experimental electronic producer and found sound manipulator Caro C, and gramophone glitching artist Naomi Kashiwagi – were inspired to put on the event because “we felt increasing the visibility of her amazing work as a pioneer in the UK was still of relevance today". 

Coventry-born Derbyshire was also behind many other sonic experiments and sound effects, which she termed 'psycho-acoustics', and the Delia Derbyshire Day seeks to reappraise her ongoing influence on electronic, experimental and popular music. As Caro C explains, “She is best known for her realisation of Ron Grainer's original Dr Who theme tune but she also came up with so much more interesting and curious creations." Naomi Kashiwagi added: "One of the things that drew me to Delia Derbyshire was the tactile, systematic and meticulous processes she used, cutting and splicing tape together to construct music. Manipulating sounds from everyday objects created something extraordinary and in many cases otherworldly and timeless."

An afternoon event will include a screening of award-winning film the Delian Mode, followed by a Q&A with director Kara Blake, and a panel discussion featuring experts on Derbyshire's intriguing life and work (3pm-6pm). This will be followed by performances of new commissions undertaken by the Delia Darlings, who have created new works based on their adventures in the Delia Derbyshire archive, accompanied by live visuals from Kara Blake (8-10.30pm). Caro C explains, “We felt it was rather exciting that her audio and other material archives happen to be held here in Manchester. So we thought why not make a day of it and with some true Delian experts on board and present."

Derbyshire's archive, which contains original tapes and other materials, is held by the University of Manchester at the John Rylands Library. David Butler, senior lecturer in screen studies at the University, who helped bring the archive to Manchester, said that the Delia Darlings were among the first to delve extensively into the archive, and he was delighted with the project's aims and potential impact: "It's always been our hope that Delia's tape and written archive would provide the inspiration for new works responding to Delia's life and extraordinary music,” he said.

Caro C enjoyed listening to the digitised tape archives and hearing pieces in construction, such as the spacey, reflective 'Blue Veils and Golden Sands'. "The craft and grace in this piece really moved me," she explains. "I was also particularly blown away by a synth pop piece she made in 1971 and the techno track that she made in the late 1960s. She really was ahead of her time and I love it when my concept of time being linear is challenged."

Among the most interesting artefacts were Derbyshire's school books, which Caro C says she found "really touching, maybe because I had not kept my own and they reminded me of all the care and learning we put into our school work (sometimes)". She said: "The Latin exercise books and English essays were really interesting for me – with hindsight you can see signs of her career there already."

Caro C's piece uses some of Derbyshire's school exercise books and sine tones, as well as her sampling or her own voice, for inspiration for lyrics and sounds. She explains that she was inspired by how visionary the music of sound pioneers like Delia Derbyshire was, and the “technical ingenuity, time and dedication required to do what they did”. In today's age of laptop software, which makes it easy to experiment with new sounds, she feels Derbyshire's efforts, as well as the work of other sound pioneers like Daphne Oram, are more worthy of respect than ever.

The film and performances will also appear at FACT in Liverpool (Wednesday 16 January), Queens Social Club, Sheffield (Friday 18 January, supporting Eccentronic Research Council) and Newcastle's Star and Shadow cinema (Sunday 20 January).

Delia Derbyshire Day takes place at Band on the Wall on Saturday January 12.

Full Day: £12. Afternoon event only: £6. Evening event only: £7.50

http://deliaderbyshireday.wordpress.com

The Delian Mode illustration by Brigitte Archambault 

Tune into architecture: LoneLady's The Utilitarian Poetic/Manchester's Modernist Heroines walking tour to be repeated

As Love Architecture festival celebrates buildings great and good, one installation is reminding us of an equally important part of the built environment which tends to attract less excitement – the infrastructure all around us, that gets us from A to B.

The Utilitarian Poetic makes a new song by Warp Records' LoneLady, resident in one of the nearby housing blocks that is surrounded physically and aurally by the the hum of the car, available to anyone who plugs their headphones into a temporary socket cemented into a slip road where the Mancunian Way curves down towards the ground. The work inhabits a barren, leftover landscape – battered flowers and trees grow out of an undulating floor of rocks, discarded sweet wrappers and broken glass – where one isn't inclined to stop. It's demarcated only by a lavender graffiti tag, one among several impermanent scrawls. The song, 'Good Morning, Midnight', loops metallic percussion, distant echoes and fade-outs over bassy undertones, constantly on the move; even its rhythmic bleeping could be there to guide you across the next road. The hiss of the traffic continues in the background, audible over the headphones, as cars charge past, cyclists puff and pedestrians scurry home.

As I stand, a lone listener plugged into a wall for five minutes, no-one stops to ask me what I'm doing, or comes to have to go. They're all plugged into thoughts and sounds of their own. But it made me think: if our roads are part of the physical, utilitarian infrastructure, then music and dancing are part of a cultural infrastructure that's no less necessary; an unofficial, after hours route to escape where dreams are dreamed, connections are made, friendships are forged and networks come and go.

A pamphlet on The Utilitarian Poetic, including a location map, can be purchased for £1 from Manchester Modernist Society's pop-up shop in the Royal Exchange until Sunday June 24, 1pm-8.30pm. The installation runs for the same period (or as long as the life of the battery!).

In other news, the Manchester's Modernist Heroines walking tour, an outcome of a joint project between the Shrieking Violet, Manchester Modernist Society and the Loiterers Resistance Movement, will be repeated on Thursday June 21 as part of the Love Architecture festival.

The strange stories of sounds — Kinokophone at MadLab

Last Thursday I spent the evening in the Northern Quarter immersed in strange sounds and unusual storytelling. 'Kinokologue 1: Sound spore', a temporary sound art installation in the exhibition space at MadLab, was the culmination of a Cornerhouse/Paul Hamlyn Foundation Micro Commission, followed by Kinokophonography upstairs, a regular listening event which showcases sounds sent in from all over the world.

'Kinokologue 1: Sound Spores' was an interactive collection of sound specimens arranged as 'spores' embedded in different objects. Spores were tucked in drawers and filed neatly in a cabinet ready to be opened, or presented as threaded images, interpreted by embroidery artist Akiko Yanagimoto, framed in glass as if in a collaged scene. At the same time as vintage objects were reused and reinvented as listening posts, everyday sounds plucked from their context took on a new meaning as part of a growing sound archive. Listeners were invited to borrow headphones, wander round and get ready to listen closely, then help classify sounds by suggesting categories or turning dials to bring sounds together into compositions and writing down instructions based on successful combinations for future visitors. Although samples included recognisable sounds and even those we might conventionally call music — the meandering of a violin, piercing whistles — the most exciting sounds to explore were those that did not have an obvious source. Burbling water and crunching leaves are atmospheric, but more elusive sounds such as faint 'put-putting' or vaguely familiar scraping are the most interesting as, rather than placing you directly in a scene in your head, they make you listen again and again to try to remember back to the situation in which you've heard them before (if at all).

The origins of the word 'kinokophone' are drawn from both cinema ('kino') and sound ('phone'), and it's easy to build a mental story around each spore. Some sounds stand on their own

— such as the simple, repeated onomatopoeia of the Japanese word 'nyokinyoki', but the recordings presented on the night were not heard in isolation. Contributors either introduced their recording in person or sent a description and context for their sounds, whether a reminiscence about a visit to the dentist that brought about a recording of a dentist's drill and suction — "my pain is your listening pleasure", an anecdote about the conditions in which the recording was taken — conjuring up the exposed, windswept discomfort of hanging around on the side of the mountain to record a pile of rocks, or more technical descriptions about how the sound was achieved — as in 'Growth of reverb', a recording taking advantage of the effects of footsteps on the acoustics of a stairwell at the University of Manchester, a place that was well known to some of the audience. Even those recordings that feature the presence of people are disorientating once stripped of their context: you wouldn't have guessed the setting for a conversation between young people unless told it took place at a goth festival in Whitby.

Sitting in a room of neatly arranged rows of chairs listening to recordings might seem like a strange concept for an evening, but the host described it as a way to "find out about the world by listening to what's around". Whilst my expectations of what an ice berg in Australia would sound like (sparse, barren, windswept) were confounded (it actually sounded bubbling, watery and alive), the recording of a busy, noisy, early morning in Mombasa sounded as if it could have been taken from any urban dwelling or office block with the window open on a summer's day. Recordings such as the Amazon rainforest, taken from the British Library, with its variety of sounds and array of natural wonders (including a bird whose recurring call descended a scale in a way that was almost comical and another bird whose insistent brilling made you wonder if it was the inspiration for the telephone's ring), and an amazingly evocative amplification of tree roots creaking in the wind like groaning wooden furniture, achieved in Lithuania using contact mikes, were beautifully observed. However, my favourite recording was of a sound so ordinary you would not normally think to stop to listen to it. A recording of the shaking of a tin roof on the Manchester University students' union, caused to move by the reverberations of the bass and drums-dominated practise session of a heavy metal band, couldn't help but make me smile.

Find out more about the work of the Kinokophone collective at www.kinokophone.com.

Yu-Chen Wang: The Splash and A Last Drop, Victoria Baths

When Yu-Chen Wang first walked into Victoria Baths she was overwhelmed by the space – its size, Edwardian grandeur and industrial-age history. Invited by Future Everything to produce a piece of work in the building, to coincide with the drawing to a close of a three month residency at the Chinese Arts Centre, she decided that, rather than try to fill or change the space she was working with (the former female pool, the smaller of two, now drained, pools that remain in the building), her work would focus on the way the audience experienced the building. She explains: “When I first went I was immediately in love with the space but I found myself very small. My own voice sounded very different. The space itself has already done a lot and there's a lot going on in there so I'm getting people to experience the space differently rather than constructing a lot or displaying a big artwork.”

On the final day of Future Everything, visitors to the Baths will encounter Yu-Chen's work in different spaces around the female pool as part of a sound and performance piece entitled The Splash and A Last Drop which imagines the creation of a machine that produces a last drop of water in Victoria Baths then multiplies it so the water will never dry up again. The work will function as a “moving device”, playing with the transition between different parts of the building.

The story starts at the Chinese Arts Centre, where an actress playing Yu-Chen is filmed boarding a spaceship which transports her to Victoria Baths. Visitors to the Baths will catch-up with the story so far by viewing this video in the former female cloakroom that once served the female pool. A nearby room housing the aerotone – an early, yet still slightly futuristic looking, jacuzzi that, when it was installed at Victoria Baths in 1952, became the first such public facility in the country – will be transformed into an installation of Yu-Chen's highly detailed drawings, which often focus on aspects of machines. When she saw the aeorotone's buttons and controls, Yu-Chen was struck by the feeling “it should be moving, going somewhere”. Yu-Chen's interest in machines is closely connected to her approach to drawing: “Machines are very much about structure and structure is about creating something. Drawing for me is a concept – how bits fit and are connected to each other. It's very much about movement. Machines have a performative element and quality and a human presence and spirit – I always imagine they will start moving and talking. And that's how I would describe what drawing is – it's not just about pencil and paper.” Likewise, The Splash and A Last Drop itself will consist of a number of “components”: “There are lots of bits and pieces put together. The viewer can look at it as a whole or as individual works."

Yu-Chen has been exploring the history of Victoria Baths through its archive, which includes photos, hundreds of memories donated by former users and artefacts relating to its past. Actors playing uniformed ticket officers will regale visitors with stories and hand out publications drawing on industrial heritage, which will act as a programme. The work will culminate with the Cavendish Singers from Didsbury singing a song entitled Songs of the Machine in the female pool, a 1910 poem about machines that start talking to humans that was later set to music by one of its members. Yu-Chen explains: “The space is so big it needs a group. A group of people gives power.” The performance will become a short film that will be screened in Manchester city centre in the days following Future Everything.

The work is a collaboration with writer Bob Dickinson, who Yu-Chen met through her residency, and six MA Media Lab students from Manchester Metropolitan University. She says: “I like to work with people who aren't just artists. The idea goes to writers, film makers, actors, costume makers – it organically develops and becomes a collective idea. It creates different readings – the text levels, the costumes, the actors, the live performance – it is a different way of constructing narrative.”

Visit Yu-Chen Wang's Open Studio at the Chinese Arts Centre, Thomas Street, Manchester from May 11-14.

www.chinese-arts-centre.org

Read more about Yu-Chen's residency on her blog.

The Splash and A Last Drop takes place at Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock on Saturday May 14. The building will be open from 10am-4pm. Free event.

Recreational science and Physical Oscillators: Interview with Antony Hall at Victoria Baths

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, gentlemen found a new hobby: recreational science. Vicars built their own microscopes. Would-be astronomers went out into their gardens and gazed up at the stars. One man kept a diary in which he wrote detailed observations about the decay of a nut whilst another, a collector, fashioned a bespoke moss jacket lined with pockets for his specimens.

Artist Antony Hall is a like recreational scientist for the twenty first century, inspired by these gentlemen of a certain age and their ability to find “interest in obscure things that weren't immediately exciting” whilst exploring new opportunities such as biohacking and nanotechnology. Often working with slides and Hele-shaw cells, he's interested in “how many different experiments you can do in a slide”.

He explains: “I always wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid – I had a sign on my bedroom saying 'lab', and I loved my microscope, but I wasn't very good at school so was encouraged not to do science. I did art instead and turned it into my science practice.

“I started doing animal sculpture. Then I looked at the natural world and how things are formed and how animals and insects behave. This got me interested in biology and ecology and the conceptual art of the 1970s.”

Antony often works with living creatures such as fish and insects. Pond Life, for example, magnified and projected microorganisms. “I like the element of collaboration with other creatures – of caring and nurturing them and getting them to behave in a certain way by providing them with things that are suitable such as food and light.”

He is a founding member of the Manchester-based Owl Project, a collective that looks at how humans interact with technology, and hacks old technology and turns it into something new, often through sound performances. Part of his practice also involves interactive workshops under the name of Tabletop Experiments. Antony explained: “I've always liked my work to be quite fun, and it makes science accessible.” Sometimes this involves showing participants how to make creations, for example 'brush-bots' – robots made from batteries, brushes and motors which draw spirographs and patterns. He describes them as: “Little units that interact. They've all got their own characters – it's as if they're alive but they're not. They dance around and back into each other. Some go round in circles and others go in straight lines.”

During Future Everything festival, Antony will be creating a “generative soundpiece” in the empty, disused gala pool in Victoria Baths, which members of the public will “walk in and compose”, experiencing invisible fields around motors via electromagnetic sensors akin to microphones that they will be encouraged to pick up and move around the space. Antony's challenge was: “How can I represent movement and liquid in this space that is now just air? How do I represent volume?” He decided the answer was to “energise objects in a big space” by suspending different motors above the pool and adding electricity: “The more energy you put in to it the more chaotic it becomes. The motors affect each other and associate themselves with each other in subtle interactions.”

He elaborated: “I wanted to represent the surface. Visitors will walk into the pool and, instead of walking under water, walk under a layer of activity. When you're beneath it you can hear it buzz above your head.” He admits: “I like going around my garden with a microphone recording the buzzing of bees.”

Inspiration for the installation was drawn from the natural world, in particular a type of beetle known as a whirligig that sits on the surface of the water and has split eyes so it can see above and below. Antony explains that: “Whirligig beetles swarm and “display” to each other. Sometimes they fight, and likewise it sounds really good when the motors clash.”

Antony's interest in capturing movement will be continued with a large wave pendulum made of jam jars hanging in the entrance to the cafe that visitors will set off with their movement as they enter and leave – simulating the continuous motion of a wave.

Antony Hall's Physical Oscillators can be experienced at Victoria Baths, Hathersage Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock, on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 May from 10am-4pm during Future Everything festival. Free event.