Tag: voice

Swim Litany at 37 Looe Street

Swim Litany: A score and a performance

Swim Litany is a visual text and spoken word score published as an A3 poster. One side presents a range of information sourced from diary records of my swims from mid-summer 2025 to mid-summer 2026. This data includes references to place, to bodies of water, to those I swam with. On the other side textual material is organised into three areas, each section having a different character, with the potential for performance by one, three, or more voices. 

Swimming is something that I do, it is part of my life, and I fit it around other things – weather, work, travel, health. Senses of rhythm, of repetition, of the social activity of swimming are evident in the printed poster and in performance. Interruptions to the rhythm and variations in the text record the impact of the rest of life on my swimming, while the writing acknowledges my appreciation of access to safe water and my physical ability to swim regularly.

For a live event on August 27th, a group of performers will read from the text, their voices mixing, blending, bumping against each other as they navigate the three sections. Rhythm, repetition, overlap and silence will depend on the character of the sections, and the speakers’ responses to the words and to each other. 

Performance:  1800hrs (6.00pm) on Thursday 27th August 2026 at 37 Looe Street, Plymouth, PL4 0DQ  as part of the Bathing Places exhibition. 

review of Lives of the Voice

My review of Lives of the Voice: An Essay on Closeness by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is now live on the Leonardo Reviews site.

The book set me thinking about my father’s voice, remembering a mixture of emotions, of expectation and resistance. My father was a farmer, but also a singer, singing at weddings and funerals, at home and to his cows. Known locally as a singer, his reputation generated a mix of embarrassment and pride in me as a child and created expectations that I too might be a singer. Listening to other singers, I sometimes catch echoes of his voice and am drawn into a spatial-temporal relationship of nearness and distance, of connections among material human bodies and the specific sounds they produce. The bittersweet sensation that Gumbrecht highlights as specific to singing and listening to songs (p. 51-52) is wrapped up in a sense of being overwhelmed by some experiences of song, and a paradoxical sensation of proximity with voices of the dead or of artists we have never seen live.

You can read the full review here:

https://leonardo.info/review/2025/06/lives-of-the-voice-an-essay-on-closeness

‘What shall we call it?’ for First Spark

Shelley Hodgson and I are making a radio show for Soundart Radio’s First Spark Festival 2025. For broadcast on Sunday 2nd February starting at 12 noon, the programme will mix recordings, conversation and songs. Playing with ideas of names and naming as a point of beginning, connecting to First Spark’s occurence at Imbolc, a new year, a new beginning, we will look at naming ceremonies, giving names and changing names, and the idea of naming a year. The mix will include references to the film Morvern Callar, the novel 4,3,2,1 by Paul Auster, Ali Smith’s latest novel Gliff, and we will play songs with references to names and beginnings. 105.2fm

https://soundartradio.org.uk/firstspark

review of Sonic Faction now online

My review of Sonic Faction: Audio Essay as Medium and Method is now live at Leonardo Reviews. The review will be included in print in Leonardo 58.2 (due for publication in February 2025).

Sonic Faction was a pair of events, one held at Iklectik in London (July 2022) and one at KARST in Plymouth (February 2023), where three works were presented for collective listening, along with a public discussion and an installation of related material. The three pieces were: Mark Fisher and Justin Barton’s On Vanishing Land (2006), Steve Goodman’s Astro-Darien (2021) and Robin Mackay’s By the North Sea (2022). This book takes on several tasks, operating as a catalogue for or record of the events, offering an expanded commentary on the works presented and giving significant detail on the conception, making and presentation of these. The book also functions as a primer or a means toward defining or describing a genre – the audio essay – situating it in historic, artistic, critical, theoretical contexts. In pursuit of this, the book brings together a selection of essays that describe or demonstrate the audio essay as a medium and as an approach to making art. Bringing together writing by artists, theorists, publishers, broadcasters the mix of perspectives and modes of involvement with the audio essay results in an array of textual riches, supplemented by a comprehensive playlist on YouTube.

‘twiceness’ with Shelley Hodgson

On Wednesday 22nd May as part of the student organised Mayfest at Plymouth University, Shelley Hodgson and I will present ‘twiceness’. This is a new performance work we have been working on over the past while. It isn’t ‘finished’ at this point, but it is at a stage that we are happy to share it.

Two performers are present, in the space, as themselves, and as participants in an act of communication. Blocks of information, of narrative, of action, combining the found, the given, and the made, are built into a sequence of telling and showing. The performance questions interaction, engaging with gesture, with doubling, with repetition, with exchange. Underlying the performers’ relationship is awareness of loss and gaps, what is missed or missing, what doesn’t carry across.

The work asks questions that the performers unpick, rework, worry at. How do we tell each other things? How do we know we mean the same? How do we move between registers and codes, adapting and adjusting to fit, to ease, to stick? What happens if we try to do it again? Moving between choreographed passages and improvisation, the piece engages the audience with consideration of what it takes to get along with each other.

‘twiceness’ is a new performance by Shelley Hodgson (writer/sound artist) and Mark Leahy (performer/writer). The two have been aware of each other’s practice for some years but had not found a way to work together. This piece arises from collaborative working, the joint development of ideas, and finding a form for live presentation.

Performance details: 1930hrs on May 22nd 2024 at The House Studio, University of Plymouth. Free tickets available via Eventbrite.