Shifting Soundscapes: Live SPILL Performance

It was a privilege to recently be invited back to SPILL in ipswich to perform as part of their Think Tank Live season of events.

SPILL have always been very supportive of my development (and the development of lots of other talented artists in East Anglia), and I had previously spent a week-long artistic residency with them back in 2023. The residency had allowed me to plan my village soundscape project and to gain invaluable guidance from the SPILL staff.

I approched the Think Tank performance as a chance to bring the project full-circle, to present the contact of my soundwork to a (hopefully) inquisitive sold-out audience and to use the Q&A session to shape where the project might go next. The thirty minute performance also allowed me to demonstrate some of my homemade instruments, showcase my cartographical approach to arranging composition and allowed a certain level of audience interaction…

The Shifting Soundscape performance began with my recreation of working sounds created by and heard in the daily lives of farm labourers in the late Victorian and early 20th century. Using contact microphones it was possible to demonstrate the sound of stonepicking in the fields and a homemade set of clappers were used to chase away imaginary rooks. The sampled sound of a corncrake appeared regularly, along with various equine and natural sounds of which some remain today. Items found and foraged from the village had been selected by the audience before the performance started and were used to excite the strings of a prepared guitar replicating blacksmith sounds and the natural world.

Image by Robin Deacon of SPILL

The central focus of the piece was the approach of modern farming technology as suggested in Warrenton Page’s account of village life. For me, the description of a motorised thresher on hire from Ipswich approaching the fields sounded the death knell of the unique sounds of the village as the drone of modernisation took hold. The arrival of the thresher also signified the end of the corncrake; their numbers obliterated as due to harvesting occurring earlier and removing their nesting season.

The thresher sounds were recreated by a homemade hurdy gurdy with its shrill squeaks and howls put through various guitar pedals. From this point, the soundscape became dominated by modern recordings of irrigation units, Apache helicopters, chainsaws, self-service bleeps and an ice cream van. The piece culminated in a final recording of a hot tub motor whirring.

During the preceding Q&A it was wonderful to discover that a proportion of the audience were from the Shotley peninsula and had come to find out more about their local soundscape. Two of the bell ringers who featured in one recording were present, as were numerous members of Warrenton page’s family. One person drew an interesting comparison between my thresher recreation and a chapter in ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ that was completely unknown to me!

There were discussions about sounds we all could remember from our childhoods that were often linked to a reward such as the ice cream van, and an international field recordist spoke about how they experienced the sound of cars encroaching on their recordings made at almost every location around the globe.

Whilst packing up it was suggested that the performance could be staged again, but this time in the village. By the next morning, the community had already started planning dates and had found a venue and PA.

Shifting Soundscapes will hopefully be performed in Holbrook in January 2026, amongst the community that helped shape it.