hot off the interweb

Here's the link to a recent interview in Sweden about the rivercities research there. If you don't read Swedish (all put up your hands...) try Google Translate. A bit hilarious, but will give you the gist!

Carolyn

http://tidningenkulturen.se/artiklar/nyheter-mainmenu-53/inrikes-mainmenu-49/9602-vattnets-floedande-kretslopp-till-maenniskans-sjael-och-hjaerta

Back in London

Thanks to everyone for your interest and support of the project so far, and in Sweden! Those who attended the performances on 29/30 July – we'd value hearing your further thoughts/criticisms. We were really inspired by our month along Göta älv...now back in the riot-torn streets of London I'm reflecting on flows, floods...and fire. Is the urge to acquire MORE STUFF whilst mindlessly destroying your own home, purely an outcome of extreme disconnection from everything...except the imperative to consume? This afternoon I cycled along the River Lea in east London...the wild grasses and flowers are as lovely, the water just as green with algae, the Olympic site still buzzing with machinery, the river swollen and high with rain, the current still stopped and stagnant because of all the locks and controls. Has the river also forgotten its connection to the not-so-distant sea? How can it receive the rain, replenish our taps and reservoirs...yet languish like an open sewer? Fact: the people who burned this city have also drunk this water. And this water has travelled across the world, through storms, glaciers and bloodstreams...to visit this place for a time. Today I think that the city, London, has lost its sense of being part of that global circulation, of the interconnection between people and actions and places. Of course not just London, but I write of the city where I am now. And the river.

Carolyn

London-Göteborg

Today is my last day of my interlude in London before returning to Göteborg. I have mostly been focussing on preparing a few pieces of music in order to be able to choose and develop the appropriate ones for the spaces we have for the performance. Yesterday my young daughter and I went down to the Lea and cast off some little paper boats.



I managed to slip and fall on my behind in the mud and ended up making rather more of an intimate connection with the water than I was expecting... Hoping my boots dry before I need to leave for Sweden.
I collected some Lea water - clearer than I expected - to bring to Göteborg, and looked at the reeds growing in the nearby Middlesex Filter Beds: a water treatment plant that has been turned into a kind of park/nature reserve (my thoughts about which are here). They are too thin - and, I guess reedy - to use as whistles so I've regretfully abandoned the idea of making a whole load of them for the audience to play. I will be taking my saxophone mouthpiece with me to transform the sewage pipe into an instrument though, or at least to try. Looking forward to finding out what kind of interesting noises result. I'm also looking forward to exploring this pile of building rubbish I found very close to the river just before I left Göteborg last time:

Pipes and tubes! Let's hope no one's cleared it up before I get there. I'm hoping to do this with some of it.




Keith

underwater

This week we had a wonderful opportunity to experiment with movement underwater, in a pool in Trollättan (thanks Erik!). Here's a video showing a tiny bit of what happened...

River playlist

One of the threads of my research has been to find songs that are about rivers: I was interested in how they are represented, culturally and musically, and how this influences the way in which we frame our own responses. Here's a few of them, from a broad range of artists, that stood out for me. Any new suggestions would be very welcome: please leave them in the comments.

Playlist

Keith

where does it begin?

You could say that a river begins with a rainstorm. Or in the case of the Lea in England...it comes bubbling up out of the ground. Göta alv starts from a lake...but that lake comes from another river, and before that another lake. The Yukon River in Canada also comes from multiple sources in the coast range of mountains, though mainly from Llewellyn Glacier at the southern end of Atlin Lake. Here in Sweden we've travelled to several places of beginning....in this clip the river Göta älv a little south of its source Lake Vänern, as it passes through the hydro dam at Trollättan.

By contrast, the Lea begins unceremoniously in a damp field in Luton...dominated by a sewage outfall pipe. Does this foreshadow the river's fate at the hands of humans?

Carolyn

Silent, invisible.

One of the observations I have made during our research has arisen from the field recordings I have been making. A lot of the things I have been interested in are the different kinds of sound made by water in the environment. This has included:

the sound of of lake water glugging in a storm sewer outflow pipe

rain on the still water surface

water in the falls at Trollhättan

waves underneath the pier at Eriksberg

condensation inside a container falling into the water below near Lille Edet

It’s a very obvious thing, but it took me a while to realise it through making these recordings, that water only makes a sound when it comes into contact with something else: another body of water, an obstacle, a pipe or a rock. Water sounds are very contextual. Water animates or activates other forms. The river itself flows predominantly silently; the way water flows internally is mostly invisible too, something that became obvious when we watched the small pasta-like plastic forms they use in sewage treatment for nitrogen-eating bacteria to grow on swirling in their tank: they are so dense in the water that they show three-dimensionally the water flow patterns, surprising, because it is normally almost undetectable.

Silent and invisible: water has this quality of mysteries and secrets about it. Things are hidden in the water, or thrown in to become psychologically negated, washed away beneath it’s concealing surface. Mythologically, the river acts as a repository of secrets and strangeness - Loki hides from Odin’s wrath in a river beneath a waterfall after having engineered Baldr’s death; Hagen throws the Nibelungen treasure into the Rhine. Orpheus’s disembodied head, still singing mournful songs, floats down the River Hebrus to the Mediterranean. Set fools Osiris into getting into a box, seals it with lead, and throws it into the Nile.

I think it is partly this notion of the river as an eraser or concealer of things that informs our modern relationship with our hydrological environment; the way in which we feel ourselves to be somehow apart from this natural sytem that flows around and through us. Once our waste and rubbish is in the water, it seems as if it is absolutely gone.

Keith