Commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for Between the Ears, Hearts, Lungs And Minds won the Bronze Award at the 2008 Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago.
This ‘composed documentary’ explores the experiences of transplant patients and the extraordinary issues raised by this invasive, last-option medical procedure.  It weaves intensely personal narratives, often recorded at the bedside, with the sounds of the hospital environment, which can have an enormous effect on patients, shifting unpredictably from comforting to irritating, from reassuring to alarming.

During my time at the Harefield transplant centre with photographer Tim Wainwright, I noticed that noise seems to come in waves: sometimes it is quiet enough to hear nurses' uniforms swishing, birds singing outside and the snap of latex gloves, but the atmosphere regularly builds to a cacophony of bleeps, bells, phones, pagers, voices, trolleys, bins, bags and plastic apron dispensers. My observations and interviews confirm anthropologist Tom Rice's assertion that in hospitals sound takes on "a more affective quality because of the drought in other sensory modalities." Particularly if they are restricted to bed, what a patient sees is limited, smells are generally overpowered by disinfectant, and the food is bland. Consequently, hearing becomes arguably the most important sense for understanding the environment and making sense of one's experience.

All of the people whose voices are heard in this piece have had a heart and/or lung transplant or were waiting for one when I met them. Some have since died; others, including Ian (left), who lived with two ventricular assist devices (VADs) plumbed in through his abdomen for more than a year while waiting for a new heart, are doing well. All the sounds were recorded within the transplant centre, though some have been twisted and shaped afterwards, often in response to the comments or stories of patients. The piece hovers on the borders between sound and music, documentary and sound art, exploring what Rice calls 'the cacophony of disease'.

Hearts, Lungs And Minds

This is an interview with Paolo Pietripaolo about the Anspayaxw project on the occasion of the opening of the installation at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver.

CBC North By Northwest (re Anspayaxw)

BBC Radio 3 Hear & Now (re Beating Tones And Flapping Wings installation)

Violin Study 003 2020

This was a semi-improvised song recorded on cassette in the basement of a squat in Camberwell in the mid 1980s (incidentally, the same flat in which Boris Johnson was living with his girlfriend when neighbours called the police because of a violent row they were having, just before he became Prime Minister). I'm playing rhythm guitar, Miguel Orgel on lead guitar. Can't remember the name of the fiddle player, I think she was Irish. Lyrics, vocals and drums by Neil Rogers, who sadly died falling off Beachy Head in the 90s.

Running Naked (1987)

This is a tape manipulation piece I made in the mid 1980s from a performance of Harvey Andrews' song "Unaccompanied" by two women I knew back then, Kym Wynne-Stanley (Kym Jones as she was then), and Jackie (I don't think I ever knew her surname). It was recorded on cassette, then manipulated with both cassette and reel-to-reel techniques.

Glass Of Booze (1986)

I made this piece in 1982 while living in a residential hotel in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, a neighbourhood most often associated with sleeze, alcoholism and drug abuse. I found a small electronic organ on the street and deconstructed and detuned it. The piece was made in a single performance, during which I added some minimal guitar sounds as it was recorded on a Nagra 1/4" tape recorder. The tape was then subjected to some simple manipulations in the sound studio of the San Francisco Art Institute, where my partner was a student.

SF Winter 1982

This is my second violin study since I started learning the instrument last year. Apart from the faint drone at the start, all the violin is live and unprocessed.

Violin Study 002 2020

Hearing Voices is a ‘composed documentary’ which features recordings of various click language speakers from D’kar in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana.  Apart from the voices of various academics from the field of linguistics and endangered languages, every sound in this half-hour piece for radio is derived from the Khoisan subjects' voices and their environment.  Hearing Voices moves seamlessly between documentary and abstraction, language and music, weaving together interviews, field recordings and music in a compelling and adventurous exploration of languages on the verge of extinction.

David Toop writes: "Through his research and practise in Botswana, recording click language speech by individuals who collaborate as performers at the beginning of a process, Wynne constructs an experience that flickers on the boundaries between speech and sound, and the various levels of meaning that can be derived from human communications. Simultaneously, the work alerts the perceiver to the beauty of language and its potential as a plastic medium, to specifics and generalities, to political and economic realities, and to the troubled, yet fruitful connections that can be nurtured in spite of an intimidating geographical, linguistic, cultural, and technological divide."

Hearing Voices

"John Wynne’s Upcountry is — part of the time — a musical portrait of Kenyan master musician William Ingosi Mwoshi, who plays, sings and speaks about his music, cites its roots and his. The environment of a Kenyan village colours his expression and makes his world. He, his locality, and the words and music he creates appear indivisible. A documentary ensues. Ingosi’s time.

John Wynne’s Upcountry is — part of the time — an abstract journey. It often takes a route inland — upcountry, in fact. Ingosi’s vocal inflections become material for Wynne’s cool, sinuous tones. Layered, whittled down to bare bones, or mixed into new strata; at times Wynne’s abstractions stretch out to measure space quite differently from Ingosi’s speech rhythms, or indeed the rhythms of his songs. Wynne’s time." Katharine Norman

Upcountry

This is a wax cylinder recording of a flying radio I made as part of the installation Beating Tones and Flapping Wings in 2010. See http://www.sensitivebrigade.com/Beating_Tones_and_Flapping_Wings.htm

Flapping Wings

This interview with Chicago Public Radio came after my "composed documentary" Hearing Voices won the Silver Medal at the 2005 Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago.

Chicago Public Radio (re Hearing Voices)

John Wynne is a sound artist whose practice includes large-scale multi-channel installations for galleries and public spaces, delicate sound sculptures, flying radios and award-winning ‘composed documentaries’ which hover on the boundary between documentation and abstraction. His installation for 300 speakers, player piano and vacuum cleaner became the first work of sound art in the Saatchi collection in London and won him the 2010 British Composer Award for Sonic Art.  His work with endangered languages includes a project with click languages in the Kalahari and another with one of Canada’s indigenous languages, Gitxsanimaax. He has been artist in residence at two world-leading centres for organ transplantation.  John is Emeritus Professor of Sound Art at the University of the Arts London and has a PhD from Goldsmiths College, University of London.

John Wynne

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