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

The water moves through

Poking around the water supply and sewage treatment systems for Göteborg got me wondering about the constant circulation of water in the world....about how long it takes to pass through our skies, oceans, lakes, and living bodies...Some answers below taken from a UNESCO report: (http://webworld.unesco.org/water/ihp/db/shiklomanov/summary/html/summary.html#2.%20Water%20storage)

Table 1. Periods of water resources renewal on the Earth

World Ocean - 2500 years

Ground water - 1400 years

Polar ice - 9700 years

Mountain glaciers - 1600 years

Ground ice of the permafrost zone - 10,000 years

Lakes - 17 years

Bogs - 5 years

Soil moisture - 1 years

Channel network - 16 days

Atmospheric moisture - 8 days

Biological water - several hours

Carolyn

A couple of videos of two of our rivers together:

Weeds in the Göta Älv, giant hogweed by the River Lea.

Water: River Lea, Göta Älv.

Pipes and reeds

A river is the main way that our on-land environment transports water from one place to another. During our visit to the sewage treatment plant in Göteborg, Gryaab, I noticed very forcefully the very obvious fact that the human transport of water – of fluids in general – is done through pipes, which linked itself in my mind to the circulatory systems of the human body which is a web of tubes and pipes.



This idea attached itself – rather like phosphate particles in sewage exposed to iron sulphate – to the idea that had been forming in my mind of making musical instruments from things I might find in the river (this idea in turn was triggered by seeing bone flutes in the museum in Lille Edet, a town a little way upstream on the Göta Älv from Göteborg).



I had collected reeds washed up in the harbour in Göteborg, with the intention of making small whistles. This turned out to be much harder than I had thought, but using a drinking straw as a noise making reed stuck in one end of the reed stem I managed to make a kind of duck noise, which while rather ugly was at least a start. I found a bit of used pipe on the roof of the Biogas building which had been used for sludge - the remains of the organic matter that had been removed from the sewage – and asked if I could take it with me: I got an odd look but permission nonetheless. Once I’ve managed to disinfect it I think I will try and make an instrument out of it, perhaps using a saxophone mouthpiece, or perhaps cutting a hole like a flute. I’m going to try and collect some more reeds, too: maybe even cut some fresh ones, and see if I can make some more successful whistles: I will see if I can find any in London too. Our performance might involve asking the audience to play something, or I might make something they can take home with them.

Keith

Göteborg

This week, we have begun the next stage of rivercities, which has brought us to the Göta Älv, and Göteborg, the city it runs through. We are here to research the relationship between the people of Göteborg and their river, how they use it, feel about it and engage with it; and to put together a small-scale performance at the end of July, rivercities/f r e e z e.

So far we have travelled to the source of the river, some 93 km from Göteborg by road; we have walked and cycled around the Göteborg parts of the river, and visited the museums here; today we went on a 9 hour boat trip and travelled upriver to Kungälv where it diverges, and took the northern spur to the sea, then along the coast back to the city. Tomorrow we'll be visiting the sewage treatment plant and later on in the week we're off to see the place where they purify the water from the river for the drinking water supply.

We will be adding our individual thoughts about our research in the coming few days.