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/

ayearinthecountry.co.uk/airwaves-songs-for-the-sentinels-cassettes/


File under: Year 2 – Audiological Transmissions

Continuing in a further wandering / line from genuine land art, utilitarian accidental folk-art, pragmatic ornamentation, bricks, mortar and cement and their possible antithesis the patterns and language of trees (see here, here and here)…

Generally in rural landscapes what can be thought of as brutalist, utilitarian architecture is restricted to a few very specific areas and locations – there are often a surprising number of industrial complexes of one sort or another scattered throughout the countryside, amongst quarries etc but they are generally sporadic, sometimes hidden away from passers by and roads, sometimes spectacularly imposed and imposing on the landscape.

Now, while I don’t consider the senders / sentinels of broadcast towers as strictly brutalist architecture, as mentioned in earlier notes and scribing they share a similar utilitarian nature and their own structure / accompanying buildings and outgrowths may well share similar materials and aesthetics.

However, I don’t tend to think of such structures as broadcast towers, electricity pylons, telegraph poles and possibly wind power turbines as blots on the beauty of the land; more that they are points of reference, beacons amongst the landscape.

Although more modern (modernistic?) in nature than say dry stone walls and though produced and placed by the hand of man, for myself they share a similar sense of becoming / have become part of the landscape; a sense of bedding in, of belonging, of threading and interweaving through the land (or possibly in the case of pylons that would be more of a march) and/or they stand as do their often forest and tree companions, as gathered or solitary interconnected tendrils and patterning.

The contrasts of the above brings me to a duality of both celebration and sometimes extemporary unease that seems present and at play in amongst my own work, its weavings, channellings and my relationship with the beauty of the land:

“…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…” (from previous notes and scribings on Airwaves).

ayearinthecountry.co.uk/audiological-transmission-8-of-52-airwaves-tales-constructs/


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/
credits