Nastassja Simensky produced Colloquy, a one off performance in the Thames Estuary, in 2014. Composer William Frampton wrote 'The London', a composition scored for String Quartet and Soprano using the numeric data from sonar scans of the wreck as source material, extracts from Samuel Pepys diary and archaeologist’s excavating the wreck. The composition was preformed by the Ligeti Quartet from the local cockle boat, Indianna, as it drifted across the breadth of the wreck, connecting the two sites. 

Built during the interregnum at Chatham in 1654, The London formed part of the English Squadron sent to collect Charles II from the Netherlands and restore him to the throne in an attempt to stem the political crisis following the death of Cromwell.

In 1665, The London sank after a gunpowder explosion whilst leaving Chatham. The wreck of the 'London' lies in two parts just 400m apart, close to commercial shipping lanes in the Thames Estuary at Southend.

The Estuary is ploughed and landscaped by precise routes, a process by which matter is turned over and revealed; a simultaneous exposing and burying.

Dredging operations deepen the shipping channel in the Thames Estuary to make way for the largest container ships in the world. Displaced silt and aggregates are transported upstream as hard core for the urban regeneration of London, creating new social and material stratification. Sonar and geophysical surveys offer up an expansive, though imprecise and fragmented map of the seabed. Penetrating the opaque body of water, this digital view generates a two dimensional compression of reality. Devoid of a horizon it offers only an illusion of perspective, skewed by data knitted together to reveal evidence of the past and provide data for strategic projections of the political, economic, social and environmental future. Machine vision and data collection for corporate analysis pushes against local and situated knowledge of those who live and work in the inter-tidal zone.

Thanks to Graham Harwood, Steve Meddle, Mylo Browne, John Hannon, William Frampton, Rachel Duckett and Ligeti Quartet

For more information visit nastassja-simensky.com/colloquy

The London [composition from Colloquy - 2014]

Collaboration with Rebecca Lee.

Rings on Water is a collection of sonic fieldnotes developed as part of Leaky Transmissions, an ongoing body of research and artwork shaped by the unruly entanglements of the Blackwater Estuary in Essex.

Rings on Water uses a variety of recording and transmission technologies, from FM radio, magnetic tape, coil receivers, hydrophones and contact mics to traverse the protected saltmarshes and shale banks of the Dengie Peninsula and industrial arable land. Slow Scan Television, and the politics of ‘radio’ as a means of transmission, collision, translation and interference are used to consider the material legacies of changing land-use and energy production in the Blackwater Estuary.

Many types of human transmission commingle and leave their mark on the Estuary, which is itself an increasingly regulated and privatised space. Cellular networks coalesce with wireless connections, electrical substations with Bluetooth signal, slow-scan television with ham radio transmissions. High-frequency short wavelengths of irradiated graphite within Bradwell A Power Station occupy the opposite end of radio spectrum to the long wavelengths of amateur radio and VLF signals generated by thunderstorms and solar weather. Non-human forces persist, from the Estuary's conductive geology, to sputtering background radiation, to the Earth's vast and sweeping electromagnetic fields.

Field recordings, vocals, text, Nastassja Simensky
Processing, editing, transmissions, mixing, Rebecca Lee

Recorded Black Water Estuary Essex, and Primary, Nottingham, spring/summer 2022.

Rings On Water (Full) [2022]

RADIO SILENCE is an audio-work emerged and developed from a poetry workshop led by Emma Bolland, to write experimentally about the spaces, metaphors, and struggles of ‘transmission’. 

In relation to analogue radio, the term ‘static’ is associated with faulty transmission or faulty reception—static is communication gone wrong. But what if ‘static’ is thought of as a rich space, a generative space, where the effort and struggle of communication is valued as a thing in itself? 

In this collaboration, Nastassja Simensky, Emma Bolland, Laroche and Gesa Helms explore the politics of ‘radio’ as a means of transmission, communication and interference.

In a series of conversations following the workshop, collaborators shared, translated and responded to individual contributions from audio captioning, scripts, radio static, stutters and the ‘machine silence’ of zoom. This material has then been mixed by Roisner and produced by sound Of ruins into a 12 minute audio-work.

RADIO SILENCE

Poetry as Field Recording is a collaborative audio work made by Anna Kime, Irina Sadovina, Ceri Nicholls, Nastassja Simensky and Ioannis Andronikidis. 

This audio collaboration emerged through a talk and workshop led by writer and poet Mina Gorji. By collectively thinking through the challenges of distinguishing and articulating what and how we hear, the group considered how listening is culturally informed, and how our comprehension of what we hear is shaped through our own language(s). This twenty-minute episode includes poetry, field recordings, reflections and linguistic experiments. Together, the contributors developed ideas and approaches to describing and recreating sound in words, as well as thinking about how they might focus and enhance their own experiences of listening to the environment around them.

Poety As Field Recording

Video Club 008:
Frances Scott
/ Slip of Telecine

In Video Club 008, ‘Slip of Telefone,’ Coated Spirits in collaboration with Nastassja Simensky are extending a speculative portrait/fan letter to artist Frances Scott. “To think of her in orbit […] to create proximity by distant means.” Following the previous definition of a fan letter, we are rehearsing a weft of readings, (field) recordings, and incantations: from Ursula K. Le Guin’s speculative glossaries of far distant times to Annie Dillard’s total eclipses and devouring shadows, and from David Tompkins’ “slip of telecine” to the aurality of film strips from the cutting room floor. We listen, with windows open to a summer night.

Bio:
Frances Scott is an artist working with moving image, her work considers the narratives and histories at the periphery of cinematic production and its apparatus. Her films are informed by a collaborative and research-led process, and since 2016 she has worked closely with filmmaker and sound designer Chu-Li Shewring. Their first co-authored moving image work, ‘Wendy’ (2023) is a film fan letter and response to the work of composer, electronic music innovator and polymath, Wendy Carlos. Commissioned by TACO!, London, ‘Wendy’ is in exhibition until 9 July 2023. The film was preceded by ‘Incantation, Wendy’ (2021) published by An Endless Supply / Bobo books, with contributors including Beth Bramich, Valentina Formenti, Stine Hebert, Juliet Jacques, Mat Jenner, Tom Richards and Dave Tompkins.

Previous presentations of Frances’ work include: Curzon Soho, London (2023); BFI, London; Curtocircuíto – International Film Festival, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Rencontres Internationales, Paris/Berlin (2021/2022); ‘Mattflix’ Matt’s Gallery, London; Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester; 38th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival; 67. International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (LUX distribution programme); transmediale, HKW, Berlin; CTM Festival, Berlin; ‘Unsung Stories: Women at Columbia Computer Music Center,’ New York (2021); and 57th New York Film Festival (2019). She was awarded The Stuart Croft Foundation Moving Image Award (2017). Her films are distributed by LUX.

Credits:

Voice Recordings: Ioannis Andronikidis & Nastassja Simensky

Sound Excerpts: ‘Diviner’ (2017) by Frances Scott | BBC Archive | NASA Archive | “Music and Poetry of the Kesh” by Ursula K. Le Guin and Todd Barton | ‘rehearsal letter’ (2021) by Tom Richards and Frances Scott.
Textual references: “Total Eclipse,” from Annie Dillard’s ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’ (Harper Perennial, 1982) | ‘Winter is a planet’ by David Tompkins (Matt’s Gallery, 2021) | “Their Waving Signals a Moon,” by David Tompkins from ‘Incantation, Wendy’ (An Endless Supply, 2021)

Access to the films: LUX, Frances Scott

Video Club 008: Slip of Telecine W/ Coated Spirits & Nastassja Simensky (13.07.23 FADE RADIO))

re-edit from video 'rocks are for throwing' 2017, Nastassja Simensky

https://vimeo.com/224640089

Composition for SATB Choir and Saxophone  - William Frampton
Soprano - Anna Harrison
Alto - Sophie Proctor
Tenor - Sam Knock
Bass - David Cane
Saxophone - Rob Corrin

Voice actors - Chris Timms, Sophia Simensky and Chipo Kureya

rocks are for throwing [radio edit for Radioprenia - 2017]

Excerpt from performance at Nottingham Contemporary, January 2020

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