"Songs" made out of the sounds of rivers, pt 2
Going one better than Jarvis Cocker singing about the Wicker river in Sheffield, here's a sound artist called Ben Tassie who created works using the sounds of the city's five rivers. In this case - 'A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time' - it's the Rivelin river. Tassie worked with instrument maker Sam Underwood to build a set of instruments played by the Rivelin itself.
"The album and the idea came out of some earlier work that I'd been doing thinking about music and nature, and how they can interact somehow – how art can give us new ways of relating to nature. Then it was hanging out in the Rivelin Valley actually, just walking there, running there. It’s such an evocative landscape – it’s beautiful there, all of this nature, but also these layers of history, this idea that the landscape has changed.
"The river has outlasted centuries of industry and yet has been shaped by the water mills, all the mill ponds and things. So I wanted to make something that interacted with that landscape, and that presented a pretty straight line to ‘I should build some water powered instruments’! It's not just imposing some art onto the landscape, but trying to have that be more of a symbiotic relationship.
"I designed and built [the instruments] with an instrument maker called Sam Underwood. Why the river playing?... I wanted two things really. One is that the river itself should have a role in playing the instruments – they're mechanical, so two have water wheels that then operate the mechanical mechanisms inside them. The other is a kind of organ that you submerge and it pushes the air out of the tank and plays these pipes.
"So the river plays them but it was also about having more of a harmonious relationship with the landscape. Each of the instruments is based on historical musical instruments: one’s kind of like a harpsichord, the other is kind of like a hurdy-gurdy. Then there's this organ, which is based on an ancient Greek instrument called the hydraulis. Historical instruments are very quiet on the whole – they're not as loud as a modern violin or something. So there's this idea of being less noisy in the environment, not dominating it so much...
"It was all about this balance and this sense of dialogue with the landscape. On some of the tracks I play alongside them – I played a medieval rebec, a string instrument, and a lap-steel guitar as well. And then Rebecca Lee played the bass viol and Rob Bentall played nyckelharpa. It really was like a collaboration, not only with the instruments but with the environment as well.... We played quite quietly and the flow of the river controlled the speed of the instruments. It did feel like a collaboration with the river...."
"Each track is one take, whatever happens within that take is the piece. Through field recording you listen differently to nature – you afford it more care and attention than you might do normally. It lets you really experience that personhood, if you like, of nature that you're describing. I think ecological sound art does that very immediately – when we hear things it bypasses a lot of the distance that has affected us as ironic, post-modern people! When you hear a river, when you hear those natural sounds, it bypasses all of that somehow."