2009 _ 002 Urban Songline Latitude: 51.4854° N – 51.48484° N / Longitude: -0.11449° W – -0.11355° W – Gasworks, London, UK
Music created from a ‘breathing’ gasholder tank in the South of London, designing a musical score from its different positions and animating from memory the movement over a three months period, which subsequently becomes a scenario for a song; the Urban Songline.
The maximum amplitude of the gasholder visible from my window during my three months stay divided into 40 steps or tones to create a reversed scoring method for the animation of the movement of the tank. The created music from the ambient sounds of the gas-tank can then be notated, re-created and distributed.
The Urban Songline that is created from the recorded sounds of the moving gas tank are pressed into vinyl records that are given away for free to DJ’s to use for sampling. This way the space it represents gets redistributed and shared through the generated music. It is a way to discuss co-ownership and appropriation of public space.
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Part of the project Urban Songlines, a utopian/dystopian series of collaborative translations of buildings, urban structures and public spaces into music through site-specific sound-generation. These performances are a way of connecting to places by listening to them as well as a research into how we use and experience the public domain and to what degree we can claim ownership over it, discussing notions of inclusion, becoming and belonging.
002 Urban Songlines was realised with generous support from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.
