Back in May The Battleground published a collaborative record of field recordings by myself and their editor in chief Joel Schalit who also very kindly sorted out mastering the recordings. The collection takes as its subject the London borough of Hounslow and the acoustic ecology of this part of the city which sits beneath the Heathrow Airport flight path.
The record is available in digital format here:
The Battleground also very kindly organised a a joint launch and discussion event along with my good friend Josh White whose latest book Tories are Dead was published this Spring.
For the release I wrote an essay of reflections on the recording process and the practice of field recordings more generally. Writing this was something of a cathartic experience for me, since making the recordings in the last summer and Autumn of 2023 was one of the last creative things I did while living in that area of West London. In November I moved out to Fleet in Hampshire and then two years later to Ash Vale just over the border into Surrey.
Plans are in the works to finally make available the collection of field recordings I made in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea over two days in August 2017 as a response to the Grenfell fire and which were the focus of this blog entry a year later lamenting the fact I'd done nothing with them. Well, almost nothing. I did use a small selection of them to produce this track from an EP I released in 2022. The title Twinkle@Street Piano (For Grenfell) refences the source of the recordings and two nuggets of urban acoustic ecology encountered during those two longs days nine years ago.
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