Listening & Lockwood

“I recorded from the banks, finding a great variety of water sounds as the gradient and bank materials changed, often feeling that I was hearing the process of geological change in real time…I realised that the river has agency, it composes itself, shaping its sounds by the way it shapes its banks”

Annea Lockwood, on A Sound Map of the Danube

In 2021, I had been introduced to the work of Annea Lockwood by Jez Riley French, who is a wealth of knowledge on women sound artists and recordists, that he often puts into talks and seminars that aim to re-map a sound history, featuring well known artists as well as those who have been obscured.

From the outset in responding to the project brief and as reference in my project plan, the way in which Annea Lockwood explores the resonance and dissonance in the story of a river over time was hugely inspiring in this canal project. My own background experience and knowledge is a completely different frame and my time on site is short, yet Annea’s work in letting the river tell its own story over time as a method, was influential in how I approached listening to the canal. I also tried to bring this together with my research on imperceptibility and observatory as concept, to think about the politics of listening and who gets to listen to - certain spaces, in certain ways - which was supported by the public sessions.

The canal is a very different body of water, with its own nuances, it is feels so slow moving and appears almost completely still without another object passing within it. The stillness almost seemed to make the boundary of the canal simultaneously rigid and fluid. Observing and listening to the otherwise imperceptible using unusual or modified scientific instruments blurs the margin, obscures the border of the canal as an urban transect. When I first arrived to the canal in September 2021, some of the first sounds I listened to intently, were industrial - was the sound of an angle grinder on the works site next to the train station, the sounds of incoming and outgoing trains, the engineering yard that backed onto the canal. It immediately played into the vivid stories I had been told about the history of the canal in other stretches, such as around the old Shelton Bar and Longport. These stories were enriched by conversations with local residents who had lived through many decades of change in the canal and the city itself.

In the book In the Field The Art of Field Recording by Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, there is a great interview with Annea Lockwood, where on page 32 Annea talks about the difference in river sounds. “..Any one spot on the Danube sounds different to another spot: the gradient, the composition of the banks, and riverbed, how much energy and friction there is, whether it’s cold - all these parameters affect the sound and make it impossible for any one river to have an intrinsic characteristic sound.” I enjoyed thinking about this and perhaps interpret it as an opposition to the kind of classification the amplifies one space or another, which is often used as a tool throughout discourse on pollution, and in apathy towards the protection of particular spaces for different groups of people.