Available in corporeal form on Audiological Transmissions Artifact #1: Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels:

ayearinthecountry.bandcamp.com/merch

ayearinthecountry.co.uk/audiogical-transmissions-artifact-1-airwaves-songs-sirens-cd-released-dawn-day-dusk-night-editions/


File under: Year 2 – Audiological Transmissions

One of the strands of the first spin-around-the-sun of A Year In The Country was a consideration of the likes of telegraph poles, electricity poles and pylons - how they could be appreciated in a not dissimilar was as say library music is - work that was created in/for a utilitarian manner but which has become in some beholders eyes a form of accidental folk-art.

Genuine land art I suppose.

Earlier around these parts I considered such things and the curating and collecting of The Telegraph Pole Appreciation Society and Poles and Pylons (see Days #279/365 and #282/365 of A Year In The Country).

At that point, when I wandered by Poles and Pylons I commented that the admiration at The TPAS for telegraph poles was only half the story - the other half being, well, the hummings of electricity cables, poles and pylons.

Now, as I type I realise that both of those may well only be a third of the story - the other third being an appreciation for the sentinels / senders that are the ever silent but chattering broadcast towers.

Such towers share more than a little geneaology, structure and design with electricity pylons in particular and all three sets/subsets play their part in binding society together through their various corporeal and less tangible spinning of threads.

That just mentioned sense of land art seems to particularly apply to broadcast towers, possibly in part because of their more scarce appearance and how they are often positioned in particularly striking, visible from afar locations; placed either in a solitary manner or gathered in tableaux’s I find that there’s a certain unknowable majesty and stoicism to these structures.

Abiding in the ether: ayearinthecountry.co.uk/audiological-transmission-5-airwaves-fading-from-a-distance/


Rebroadcast:

Notes and Scribings on Airwaves: Songs From The Sentinels;
A study of the tales told/required to be told by the sentinels/senders that stand atop the land; a gathering of scattered signals plucked from the ether, cryptograms that wander amongst the airwaves, fading, tired and garbled messages which have journeyed from nearby or who knows where…

The Airwaves set of audiological constructs are an exploration that begins with and via silent but ever chattering broadcast towers; their transmissions and sometimes secrets – the songs they weave from their own particular language and emanations.

These stilled, quietly brooding sentinels/senders are part of a network of threads, both corporeal and those less tangible, carrying on their shoulders the weight and responsibilities of passing forward those innumerable stories; of joy, day-to-day life, institutional watchfulness, our entertainments or in conclusion harbingers of storms sent from our own hands.

Airwaves harvests, weaves with and recasts the transmissions found amongst the gossamer strands of that network, intertwining these with and through the medium of cathodic reverberations/mechanisms while also taking ministrations from the wellsprings and flows of an otherly pastoralism, travelling through and amongst the brambled flipside of an Arcadian idyll and the subcultural undergrowth of the wald.

The resulting work, though drawn in part from the beauty and bounty of the landscape wherein these sentinels stand, seems to often summon unbidden some sense of loss, of the ghosts and fractures of a landscape and psyche that still contains the echoes and fragments of cold conflicts and end of days once planned for by national behemoths and those who stood beside them.

Further Airwaves related notes and scribings can be found at our main home in the ether:
ayearinthecountry.co.uk/category/airwaves-notes-scribings-audiology/