Quartet for a Landscape (2021)

New music for Icelandic Baroque ensemble, Nordic Affect

On 16 October 2021, the Icelandic Baroque ensemble Nordic Affect premiered my new work, Quartet for a Landscape, at Mengi in Reykjavik. A recording of Nordic Affect’s performance was recorded and on 2 November 2021 I played this recording, at dawn, through a single speaker installed at the rock formation ‘Stanage Edge’ on the border of Derbyshire and South Yorkshire in England. The film of this installation is the final work.

In the film, a single speaker stands static in the landscape, reproducing the frozen moment of the live musical performance. Traditional boundaries are eroded, and categories interpolated: the technological sits (alien) within the ecological; the ‘cultural’ exists against, and in the context of, the natural; the contemporary and domineeringly ‘modern’ (speaker) is dwarfed by the ancient (rock face); ‘noise’ is reconstituted as part of the musical, and so on. Nothing happens in the film. Instead, a space is opened in which the rate of our noticing can change. Tiny, almost imperceptible, alterations in light and shade, in colour, and in instrumental or natural sounds, can be perceived. In this way, I hope that the work challenges and reframes ideas of the human’s relationship to both the non-human and to the past.

You can watch the film, below. With huge thanks to Nordic Affect for commissioning, performing, and recording the work.