Photos: Julian McKenny

DULAIS - Dark Stream

An iterative practice of feeling into the river’s ongoing polyphony.

At heart it's a dance; a sympoeisis with the river’s body, all rendered in sound.

In 2006, following the birth of our first daughter, I began to visit the Afon Dulais river that flows close to my home.

I follow a practice of listening to the river’s shifting seasonal frequencies, whilst attempting to materialise these in sound. Immersing myself physically within the river, I use the machinic sensitivity of my Fender Stratocaster to allow places of eddy, surface movement and interference in the river’s body to express themselves through the guitar’s strings. I am interested in what I am able to feel and hear in this co-generated field and I make binaural recordings that serve as glimpses of this physical process.

This river plays the guitar with more sophistication than I can on my own! it has many voices…

The intra-activity generated between my moving body and the guitar’s body in correspondence within the eddies and fluctuating agencies of the river’s flow produce short episodes of undulating sound. Interference patterns in the river’s flow are sonorised through the guitar’s strings, the river’s larger cosmology briefly excavated.

For AFON I worked with photographer Julian McKenny and film maker Gilly Booth to think about how this previously ‘unseen’ practice might be presented through a visual language. It’s still a process, maybe the sound says enough? Could it possibly be made live with people present?

Ultimately, for the AFON event, I made a live work for a small house in Abercych with a small gathering of people. Working with found river crockery shards balanced on the guitar on a small trestle table, the work was to navigate these undulating material sound worlds and vibrations, hovering on the edge of feedback. A projected film of me with the guitar in the Afon Dulais played across the table onto the opposite wall. People sat on the bed…