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/

ayearinthecountry.co.uk/airwaves-download-card-set/



File under: Year 2 – Audiological Transmissions

A while ago when I read Jean Spracklands Strands: A Year of Discoveries on the Beach, which as the title states, is a year long journey of wanderings and findings upon the nation's coastlines, one of the things that struck me was when she talked about the beach at night as being an unmediated place away from the watchful eyes of authority and guardians.

She commented that the young/teenagers were drawn to them and would do what they have done throughout the ages at such times and place; imbibe, start fires and couple.

The particular set of sentinels / senders that I was repeatedly drawn to and which were a wellspring for the Airwaves set of Audiological Transmissions reminded me of this consideration.

Although not set at the edge of the land or accompanied by the washings of the tide, such installations are also often in similar unobserved and/or remote locations.

They are often marked as refuges or temporary autonomous zones for such youthful activities by the scattering of impromptu patches of burnt ground, the crushed and fading cannisters of liquid forgetfulness, branded convenience sustenance wrappers and their ilk all of which to myself always seem curiously violently intrusive.

Now, I'm wary of being all "Keep Britain Tidy" and "Darned the young folk of today".

This isn't that. I find that there is a sense of genuine disjuncture caused by such marqued detritus - a sense that it does not belong here, that it is other...

http://www.ayearinthecountry.co.ukaudiological-transmission-9​​52-airwaves-departed



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/