For the longest time, and unusually, I struggled to form a creative response to the soundwalking, or walking, stimulus that compelled me. I selected soundwalking as a written subject because I was troubled by it, the search for knowledge from the world, the thought of making my own soundwalk never particularly excited me. I often find field recordings bald and motiveless without apparent, messy human intervention, and soundwalking demands I produce some knowledge. At least, I felt the burden of having to create a composition that meant something beyond my own determinism. My head was swimming with theory and philosophical debate, and carrying a similar air into my creative practice felt needlessly peremptory. I chose walking because I was seeking a somatic, embodied escape, walking helps process things, it’s purposeful and strident.
Shamefully, I trace my initial thoughts about this creative project to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. A remaster of the game was rumoured, then released, pushing it back into the collective conscious. I say shamefully, because sound art seems to have little truck for entertainment, and yet, banal popular culture does inform my practice a great deal. Video games are not things I profess to understand or necessarily enjoy,
A decidedly campy high fantasy role playing game, Oblivion‘s memorable story about prophecy and demonic invasion is less important to me than its world. It takes place in luscious Cyrodiil, a forested, medieval western Europe, Tolkienian pastiche, depicted charmingly and beautifully, even for 2006. I would take night walks listening to Jeremy Soule’s soundtrack, in particular this piece, on loop:
I enjoy the blurring of the real and imagined, allowing myself to pretend I was a solitary adventurer, wandering alone through the dells and woods. Sonically, allowing the music to meld with the pheasants and owls. I think it strange that virtual walking ultimately sparked inspiration over real walking, as I had intended.
I have been pursuing much YouTube media about Oblivion, and came upon the conceptual term of the ‘overworld’; the central, open map which the player traverses. In particular, the ‘overworld theme’, music designed for roaming. I thought it was an unusual, neutral state to inhabit
that I felt truly represented in the descriptive wandering of forests and fields, it always feels like home. Not in a nostalgic sense, but in reality. Long walks filled with small observations, clouds of thought accompanying.
Early in the formative processes of this project, I knew I wanted to make a work that concerned embodiment. So much of our expected working is spent sat at the computer, so I wanted to pursue a creative response surrounding something I was truly interested in, and perform daily.
Returning to these memories, alongside renewed interest in the game because of its recently released remaster, I consumed a lot of media related to it. One particular YouTube rabbit hole I had fallen down concerned speculative soundtrack pieces made in GarageBand by Emmett LaFave.
The videos brought up the idea of an overworld theme, a ubiquitous piece of music designed to fill a passive, exploratory state of mind. I thought that, in many ways, that’s how we listen to music as we walk. Coupled with this were Tolkien’s walking songs,
I began by making a brief, simplistic composition in GarageBand, an imagined piece for roaming on foot. I employed a simple, orchestral palette of harp, strings, choir, upright bass, percussion and tuba.
Taking this composition, intended to loop, I brought it into a grain sampler in Native Instruments Reaktor 6. I chose to invest in a new tool for digital signal processing as, though I am very much enamoured with the analog chainsaw carving that is pedal processing, I wanted to explore the fractal, abstract possibilities of the paradigm and challenge myself.
Within Logic Pro, I experimented with modifying Reaktor’s Grain Sampler. Granular Synthesis has a cascading, sculptural quality that I have always been drawn to, yet never fully engaged with. I suppose I have often found myself intimidated by the
This is a tool which I wish to grasp deeply, which will take sustained time experimenting with it.
I then used Ableton to convert the harmonic content of the piece to MIDI, with a view to experimenting with it with the Roland JV-1080.
Footpath NIN/22/1
I realised that perhaps I couldn’t fully engage with walking as a subject matter without examining Footpath NIN/22/1. Without doxing myself, I walk this particular local path twice a day, most days. I’ve known it to be called ‘Dead Man’s Gullet’ from my mother, only within the last two years hearing of the name ‘The Cutting’ from a neighbour. I have no idea why it earned the former name, beyond “that’s what it was always called.” The latter makes more sense, as this path is a 237 metre shortcut to the lane on the other side.
Throughout the summer of 2024, the subsidence became really apparent. The passage seemed to close day by day, choked with its new density. The path also developed sudden rises and falls, I was startled by how radically it changed, and continually. Even along the first hundred metres, I would forget the path, lose it and have to squat-push through thick ivy drapes, eyes scratched. The land was sliding downhill and distorting the path with it.
Soon enough it was closed for the first time. I would sneak in, jumping fences to see what the county council workers assigned to this were up to. Leaving for Korea again for four weeks, I hoped it would be restored by the time I got back. The absurdity of these landscapers working on a path only I probably used, and I peered from the undergrowth. Obsessed. Generations of people walking a slow motion mudslide. I thought about this temporality, a long change in the wait suddenly speeding up, radically transforming the ecology of the landscape. And all in so small a strip of land. How to explore this temporality in a compositional medium?
I came home, the path was fixed, albeit badly. With the first heavy rain, it all sloshed away again. New voids opened up and swallowed the dinky, “that’ll do” path they made. But what could they do? These natural processes warranted more resource and effort than was afforded, in order to actually stop them. Stubbornly, I kept walking it. Thick mud and exposed roots
Finally, (very much the wrong word in this constant churning, settling and resettling and upending of things) a second crew came, fully cleared the path of all trees, (bar the prow of a headless birch, the figurehead on this mud ship) tracked in the slope with excavators, without closing the path. I don’t expect it to remain, however, as it looks much the same as the first crew’s attempt.
In these pictures I include here, I attempt to illustrate some of the changes this path has undergone within the last year, and yet they don’t convey just how dramatic the shifting has been. It was a functional footpath with a bridge, then a jungle-like web of dense trunks, then this new, excoriated temporary solution to a natural problem. If it can be considered a problem. I examined the varieties of walked experience this path provided me in recent times, translating it into thematic material for an artwork. Much like the surfacing detritus, exhumed from the clay tide, a case study took focus.