Category: Notes from Lockdown

Reading:

David Hinton – Hunger Mountain: A Field Guide to Mind and Landscape

Seán Street – The Sound inside the Silence

Listening to:

Kate Carr – ‘Interiorities’

Vietnamese Buddhist Chants

Watching:

Peter Mettler – Picture of Light

Thinking About:

The influence of soundscape in psychological distancing, a theme that runs through my recent explorations of ‘positive silence’

Working On:

Sound Art and Mental Health – producing a range of sound art and slow media for in-patients at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading. The pieces will be realised through participatory arts work with NHS and community mental health services and continues previous work developing a range of focus-oriented sound art practices.

Distal Bodies – a Sound Diaries project that documents the changing soundscape of a South Oxfordshire village during the Covid-19 lockdown and beyond.

Sandokai – production of a short film exploring the text of this Sōtō Zen poem, with its presentation of the interbeing nature of independent, seemingly disparate phenomena. A collaboration with artist and resident monastic Rev. Gareth Milliken of Reading Buddhist Priory.

Belong – a series of multi-disciplinary ‘blind collaborations’ with other associate artists at the Jelly arts organisation, creating a stratified work that coalesces around the theme of ‘breathing’.

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Richard Bentley is a sound artist and researcher whose work explores focus-oriented sound arts practice and the experience of positive silence. This interest is manifested through listenings, writings, field recordings, composition, soundwalks and the development of participatory sound art exercises.

In his practice, Richard explores the interplay of mind and soundscape in experiences of positive silence. Phenomenological enquiry and documentation, through field recording and stream-of-consciousness transcription, typically provide the starting point for work, unearthing themes that are shared and developed through reflective writings, sound works and a host of interdisciplinary and participatory arts work.

Informed by this artistic practice and drawing from the fields of sound studies, art therapy and positive psychology, Richard’s research investigates focused-oriented sound art practices for wellbeing. His current work explores the experience of positive silence as freedom from distraction and the influence of the soundscape on present-centred awareness and psychological distancing. In addition to contributing to academic and public discourse on the topic, research outcomes include the development of participatory sound art practices that support wellbeing in both clinical and non-clinical settings.

Richard Bentley

Reading:

Clarice Lispector – The apple in the dark

Simone Weil – On the abolition of all political parties

Listening to:

Very Quiet Records

Watching:

Lucrecia Martel – Zama

Tsai Ming-Liang – The River

Lately:

Going on long bike rides. Thinking about what it means to be true to your life. Listening to the birds. Going in the sun when there’s sun. Developing my devotion for cashews. Writing a little bit. Making films. Working on music projects: a duo album with Mara Winter to be released this year on Another Timbre; a composition for Violeta Motta and Cristián Alvear; a remote duo recording with David Lacey of ‘Yace alguien’. A new label, Discreet Editions, that Mara and I are creating, connecting early music to contemporary experimental music. I’ve also been playing guitar, finding a variety of sounding objects, and doing little. Feeling: light, fearless, grateful.

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Clara de Asís is a Spanish composer and performer based in France. She develops an approach to sound that highlights simplicity, non-intervention and active listening as means of music making. Her works display an extreme precision and intuitive openness that involves a dedicated attention to sound on its details and its most pure forms.

As well as guitar as her main instrument, she uses different combinations of objects, materials and sound sources, incorporating electroacoustics and minimal approaches.

Her music has been released by, among others, PiedNu, INSUB, Marginal Frequency, Another Timbre, Elsewhere, and Pilgrim Talk. Some of her collaborations include Bruno Duplant, d’Incise, Rebecca Lane, Lauri Hyvärinen, Farida Amadou, Patrick Farmer, Greg Stuart, Erik Carlson, Mara Winter.

Clara de Asís

Reading:

Harryette Mullen – Notes From A Tanka Diary: Urban Tumbleweed

Fred Moten – Black and Blur

Listening to:

Miles Davis – Live-Evil

Solaris- Findings and Soundings

Watching:

The Last Czars

Meredith Monk – Book of Days

Working on:

Currently in the midst of completing my degree so i am working on my dissertation, on the  composer Julius Eastman and his narrative within classical music as a black queer man.

In Between this I’m managing to focus on a lockdown inspired project which will be out soon, it’s a collection of peoples spaces, in sound (30 seconds)  and 1 image, untouched and recorded as is.

I am also working on a voice and instrumental piece ‘’Dandelion’’ which is inspired by the life and work of (again) Julius Eastman but also acknowledging other black classical composers before and after him, alongside the experiences they may have had within these spaces. It’s also an ode to the work they have made.

As well as bringing in my own experience as a black person navigating institutions and expressing this using the voice, instruments, and some of Julius Eastman’s recorded interviews.

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Rebekah Alero is a sound artist/composer based in london. 

@rebekahalero