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

A while ago I saw an interview with Brian Eno where he talked about how once human society had reached a point where our basic survival needs were being me then we begin a process of ornamentation in life (I'm probably paraphrasing here as it is from a reasonably distant memory).

In the interview he essentially implied that ornamentation covers all of art, style, music, culture etc - books, albums, hairstyles, clothing design, exhibitions etc - they're all a form of ornamentation.

(This is a theme that he expanding on in his 2015 BBC Music John Peel Lecture - that art was everything we don't need to do.)

I was recently thinking about this lecture again and how broadcast towers, telegraph poles and electricity pylons could be considered a form of accidental folk-art (see here for notes and scribings on such things) or also a form of pragmatic ornamentation.

This made me think of the phrase "pragmatic ornamentation" - building and maintaining broadcast towers, pylons etc are things that we need to do (at least we need to do them in order to maintain society and its infrastructure at a certain level) but there is also the element of design, beauty, appreciation to them - utilitarian accidental folk-art is another phrase that could be used.

If such structures/constructions/creations can be seen as such, as "pragmatic ornamentation" then they are quite possibly a section of our endeavours that straddles the above definition of art and need.

You could place something like say cutlery in a similar bracket but here I think broadcast towers, telegraph poles and electricity pylons I think differ - cutlery, even at it's most basic often has a more overt element of deliberate aesthetic design and intention than the sentinels / senders and societal threading nodes in question.

Hmmm.


Despite, if living upon these shores, most probably already having paid a yearly stipend for such things, Mr Eno's lecture can nolonger be viewed and perused in its original cathode ray transmission form at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06dcmxl but fortunately it can still be read in electronic black and white here: downloads.bbc.co.uk/6music/johnpeellecture/brian-eno-john-peel-lecture.pdf.

Abiding in the ether: ayearinthecountry.co.uk/audiological-transmission-6-of-52-airwaves-imparting-received



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/