A six movement noise opera about artists, gentrification and globalisation and how the financial and political turmoil of the 1930s has come back to haunt us...

Compiled, produced, edited : Joseph Young

"A Declaration for Failure" by Rowena Easton, performed by Joseph Young, recorded by Aleks Kolkowski on an Edison Phonograph wax cyclinder

Gentrification Suite

The Ballad of Skinny Lattes and Vintage Clothing

From a 2008 project "Le Madame", curated by Patricia Scanlon and featuring the voices of Scanlon, Deborah Levy and Mine Kaylon

The Destruction Of Language (after Le Madame)

A short series of field recoridngs made on research trip to China in March-April 2019.

Pearl River boat people

A 'remote haunting' created as part of a practice-based PhD 'KIllruddery: Listening to the Archive' at SMARTlab UCD, supported by the Irish Research Council. This particular haunting was conceived during the 'Time Travel' research project, courtesy of Creative Futures Academy at NCAD and IMMA. 

The exhibited version of this piece is installed in the grounds of the Killruddery estate as part of a geo-located sound trail 'The Ancestors'. The version heard here differs slightly from that.

Walk This Place

A work of sonic autobiography telling the author's story of his childhood interest in sound, through a series of "sonic photographs"

The Family Album

A re-enactment of a draft speech for broadcast on May 24th 1928, marking Empire Day by its founder Reginald 12th Earl of Meath. From the archives of Killruddery House & Gardens.

Published here as part of the appendix to 'Killruddery: Listening to the Archive', a practice-based PhD thesis at SMARTlab University College Dublin.

Empire Day re-enactment May 24th 1928

'Baby Giuseppe' taster

Words and music: Joseph Young aka Baby Giuseppe
Lead vocal: Baby Giuseppe
***
Arrangement: Joseph Young & Richard Crowe
Backing vocals: Young & Rich
Synths: Young
Drum programming: Rich
Guitars: Rich

I Can't Believe it!

This audio paper explores through a ‘thinking out loud’ how  soundwalking practices in the landscape can contribute to the discussion of contested histories through the creation of immersive sonic encounters. The paper takes as its starting point a recently completed practice-based PhD research project in Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland which explored the colonial-era archives of an Irish aristocratic family through walking and listening. 

The PhD, Killruddery: Listening to the Archive explored what it means to listen to a written archive, in order to examine how that archive could be brought into the public realm as a walking experience, displacing the hidden voices, the 'sonic spectres of archive' into the grounds of the Killruddery estate where they are summoned through the power of geo-location. 

In this remote audio paper, the idea of listening to the archive is brought to audition as a methodology for an artistic research process, how musing whilst walking (and simultaneously recording those thoughts) contributed to an artistic understanding of place and social context, through the interaction of the lived soundscape and the artist’s internal dialogue. The geo-located soundwalk that was produced as a result, The Ancestors (currently live on the Echoes platform) re-enacts this listening process for the listener/walker as they encounter the titular ancestors, the landscape and architecture whilst immersing themselves in over 400 years of archival material. 

Using original field recordings from the Killruddery estate, overlaid with a central narrative voice, the artist-researcher attempts to think through a process of examination, sonification and experience, using the audio essay format. 

“How do we walk this place,
In silence or in doubt?
How do we understand history,
Through architecture 
or through absence”

(Young, 2020, Walk This Place)

Soundwalking, Listening and Contested Histories

Taken from the forthcoming album on Farpoint Recordings "Sonic Hauntings in a Big House" (release date April 4th 2024).

A water powered clock on the Killruddery estate in County Wicklow, Ireland

**Binaural recording - best listened to on headphones**

Time Slips

The 2nd instalment of the Baby Giuseppe project. Recorded on four-track cassette in the 1980s in a studio flat in Kentish Town, London and remixed in the 2020s, using Pro Tools and Ableton Live.

Produced by Joseph Young (aka Baby Giuseppe)

Hard Times

Interview by Vanessa Noonan on the official opening of 'The Ancestors' on the Killruddery estate. Broadcast 23rd April 2024

Radio interview 'The Ancestors' on RTÉ Lyric FM

'listening to the wind' is inspired by the landscape of Connemara in Ireland, where I spent a four week residency last year. The work was originally conceived as a four channel sound installation for Wexford Arts Centre (Feb 2024) as part of the 'Edges' exhibition which I co-curated with Kay Aplin and Richard Carr.

It is re-imagined here as a binaural listening experience for headphones.

The voice you occasionally hear is author, artist and cartographer Tim Robinson (1935-2020) who lived in the area for decades and documented it in a series of celebrated maps and books.

listening to the wind (2024)

Created as part of a Arts Council England DYCP funded research and development project exploring female veteran voices talking about 'the sound of peace'. Originally geo-located in the vicinity of the National Army Museum, London.

What Is The Sound Of Peace?

Co-created with local residents in Islington as part of 'Make Futurism Great Again' at the Estorick Collection (2018)

SPEAK UP!

Circa Regna Tonat (It thunders throughout the realm) is a geo-located soundtrail commissioned for SLEEPERTOWN, produced by Open Gorey. 
The stereo mix presented here is one possible rendering of a site-specific work.

Circa Regna Tonat

AI generated interpretation text to accompany the 'Sounding Peace' exhibition at Aldershot Military Museum, Oct 16-Nov 16 2025.

Sounding Peace Interpretation

Stereo binaural extract of a sonic memorial to peace and peacekeeping created with the assistance of British military veterans and their families (and voiced by AI)

Best listened to on headphones...

Created as part of an exhibition at Aldershot Military Museum (2025)

Supported by Arts Councl England

Sounding Peace :: Aldershot (stereo mix extract)

Commissioned as part of Ravilious & Co : the pattern of friendship at Towner Art Gallery. This sound diptych responds to the sites of two missing watercolours from a 1927 exhibition by Eric Ravilious. The sites for the paintings are revised and rendered in 3D (or binaural audio) to create an immersive audio experience and a space for reflection on the Sussex countryside and how it sounds today...

Reproduced courtesy of the Towner Art Gallery Collection

Lane At Alciston

A stereo mixdown taken from a longer permanent four-channel sound installation at Lewes Castle. 

What you hear are fragments of verse, some original and some quoted, such as Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Sussex’ and songs recorded in situ at the top of the tower by local Folk Song expert and afficiando, Valmay Goodyear. All accompanied by original binaural field recordings of the surrounding area and layered to produce a sonic journey of the imagination.

They combine together to create an elegy for a forgotten and (possibly) mythical English landscape.

Singing the Castle to life (excerpt)

A documentary podcast of a unique water and solar powered passenger lift, commissioned by Architecture Inside Out. Designed by architect Matthew Lloyd and sited on the Duke of York's steps in London for the Festival of Architecture 2010. 

Festival of Architecture Podcast 2010

From the album "The Ballad of Skinny Lattes and Vintage Clothing". A noise opera about globalisation.

05 The Shoreditch Riots

From the soundtrack to an artist film about Architecture Inside Out - a collaborative project between disabled artists and architects. The sounds for the piece were recorded entirely in Turbine Hall at Tate Modern and then processed back in my studio to make this ambient soundscape.

Turbine #1

Cerith Wyn Evans describes his current retrospective at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill as a "love letter to the building". This is my love letter in response, a silent one. Recorded binaurally on 14th April 2012. Please listen on headphones...

A love letter in sound

A stereo mixdown taken from a four channel site-specific sound installation at Newarke Gateway, Leicester as part of "in Situ" commissioned by Leicester De Montfort University in partnership with IRCAM. Using contemporary field recordings mixed with archive sounds, the piece evokes the importance of a brown field site in England in shaping mythologies of nationalism and identity. In this case, the contested site of The Battle of Bosworth.

A field in England (Excerpt from Part 1)

01 Fanfare for the Future

02 In the beginning

03 This is where the money is

04 Quandtitative Easing

Made as part of a public art project with Kay Aplin in around the Potteries region in Stoke-on-Trent.

Resonating Canals

Sonic artist, specialist in binaural field recording, geo-located hauntological soundtrail ‘The Ancestors’ now on show at Killruddery House & Gardens in Ireland. Award-winning sound designer for theatre, TV and radio.

New album upcoming on Farpoint Recordings - ‘Sonic Hauntings in a Big House’. Pre-order from Nov 6th for limited edition vinyl edition.

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