Austin Town Hall

This is a venture that had been developing slowly over the past couple of years. Our friend Darren Pilcher, who lives just up the road, has developed an amazing system for creating soundscapes. He takes samples of real sounds: bunches of leaves, shingle, a church bell, the ambient hum of a power station, and then applies reverb, delay and loops to create potent textures and atmospheres. Wed started improvising material with him Rob playing heavy basslines and Amelia adding all sorts of other things we have lying around at home: harmonium, melodica, glockenspiel, omichord, ukulele, clarinet. We got into the habit of meeting up on Thursday evenings, creating a few tracks, and then throwing them away as it was more fun to make new ones a week later than to do anything twice.

Then we met poet Nancy Gaffield and got talking. She was interested in writing a series of poems about our local environment in Kent the ancient woods, the marshes and the shingle at Dungeness, and these were the environments wed had in mind with our music. Leaves and shingle foraged from those environments were already part of the music, buried in Darrens sound loops. We decided to combine forces and create Wealden a half hour of poetry and soundscape. The recording was made just before lockdown. We would have performed the piece live in the summer, but that was impossible. So we made a film instead. This is the final section of it.