‘Sandy Jaffas’ is the 8th (and final?) work of ‘The Hebrides Suite’, a series of works focused on the Outer Hebrides, islands off the west coast of Scotland with a rich and distinctive cultural identity as well as a complex history of settlement and migrations. Gaelic language and culture are strong. Through interviews, field recordings and existing oral history materials it investigates aspects of people’s relationship to place, moving beyond the visual and listening out for the sonic traces of past lives and past events.. 

‘Sandy Jaffas’ was made as an 8 - channel installation work commissioned for the exhibition ‘The Hebrides Suite: Mapping the Islands in Sound’ at Museum & Tasglann nan Eilean, Isle of Benbecula, Outer Hebrides, Scotland in 2015 and made with pupils from the S2 Gaelic class from Sgoil Lionacleit in Benbecula, members of the Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a Tuath (North Uist Historical Society), and the South Uist Historical Society. 

 ‘Sandy Jaffas’ investigates the resonances of place names and how they transcribe or fix memories and historical events onto a landscape. It also investigates inter-generational relationships to place names through the medium of sound, primarily oral history recordings old and new. Underpinning this research were questions about whose history was commemorated and remembered through the place names of the islands, the generational relationships to those histories as well as the differences between official and unofficial anecdotal namings and rememberings. Over the project many places were renamed by the participants according to other histories and other memories, both shared and individual. These renamings are reflected in the field recordings and interviews used in the audio work and in the paintings by pupils who took part in the project.

Sandy Jaffas Stereo Extract 1

Sandy Jaffas Stereo Extract 3

Sandy Jaffas Stereo Extract 2

‘Sweet Airs’, is part of  ‘The Hebrides Suite’, a series of works focused on the Outer Hebrides, islands off the west coast of Scotland with a rich and distinctive cultural identity as well as a complex history of settlement and migrations. Gaelic language and culture are strong. Through interviews, field recordings and existing oral history materials it investigates aspects of people’s relationship to place, moving beyond the visual and listening out for the sonic traces of past lives and past events..
Sweet Airs was composed as an 8-channel installation work during a residency at Q-O2 in Brussels in August 2014 and exhibited in a solo exhibition at Ohrenhoch Gallery, Berlin in September 2014 It was also released on the Framework Seasonal Issue 8 CD , Framework Radio, and online at 
http://www.frameworkradio.net/seasonal/spring2016/

‘Sweet Airs’ returns to an aspect of Hebridean life which I previously explored in ‘Gaoth’. The wind is an constant  accompaniment to all aspects of life and responsible for so many things in the Hebrides. ‘Sweet Airs’ concentrates on a particular type of sonic experience, common in the Outer Hebrides where, neither blocked by the built environment nor masked by the sounds of traffic, the wind acts as a carrier of human and animal presence, labour and activity, and the sounds of inanimate objects. These airborne sounds often come from far away, their source hidden from view. The piece uses recordings of some of these sonic occasions - the sounds of a birthday party far across the island; sheep roaming the cliffs; people singing hymns together in a house; cows waiting to board the ferry to be sold on the mainland; snippets of a church service and the cries of different birds. The wind also has its own voices and activates the songs of gates, plants, leaves, and fences.

Sweet Airs (stereo mix)

"From Marching Band to Marching Band (or the very extraordinary relationship between the UK peace movement and the Ethiopian Army)" is an attempt to tell the story of my time working with fighters from the cultural troupes of the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front or TPLF in the liberated areas of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia in 1987.  These solders - all musicians, and performers -  were fighting the Ethiopian government, the Derg, the most heavily armed regime in Africa at that time, and, as part of their battle for hearts and minds  wanted to learn to notate traditional Tigrayan music, arrange it for modern electronic instruments and learn to record and amplify it more effectively.

This audio essay was developed as a performance work for Land Music at symposium at City University in 2019. 

Different aspects of this story are told in 'Synthesizer and portastudio: their roles in the Tigrayan People’s Liberation struggle' - an audio essay availble in Herri issue 4 https://herri.org.za/4/cathy-lane/?fbclid=IwAR2x8sZ-WpszvU5GYs9a3BqpC57dUnxu4j1_sxKgQRn6H-hlLUdKZCVbG6o

Background to Tigray in 1987

Tigray is a province in Northern Ethiopia which has suffered severe deprivation for hundreds of years. Most Tigrayans (98%) are subsistence farmers with traditionally little access to education, health or social services and little chance to develop them in such an impoverished society. The fall of Haile Selassie in 1974 brought new hope to the peasant classes of Ethiopian society, but it soon became apparent that the new government (the Derg) under Colonel Mengistu had no intention of implementing basic democratic rights for all peoples.

The Derg is backed by the Soviet government and is one of the most heavily armed regimes in Africa. In 1975 the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front (TPLF) started operation in rural Tigray and are now in control of most of the region. The people of Tigray are fighting for national self-determination and the rights of the oppressed nationalities of Ethiopia to decide their own futures up to and including succession.

From Marching Band To Marching Band...

This site specific multi-channel sound work was made in collaboration with 
Tessa Brown. It was commissioned by Calvert 22 gallery for the show "How Is It Towards the East?". 

Using the words of family members, this work explores  how histories – individual and global – personal history and the great events of our times  - manifest through the memories and testimony (or lack)  of successive generations. It traces unacknowledged and acknowledged convergences, similarities, and dilutions through oral history interviews conducted with four generations of the White family whose the small  family business, trading in wholesale underwear, occupied the Calvert 22 premises in the 1980s and early 90s. Listening to accounts of  the evolution of the business through wartime London and pre-war Berlin to its roots in the Jewish garment industry in Poland in the early part of the 20th century reveals aspects of the process of cultural assimilation and how family memory is preserved and transmitted through stories and photographs….and lost.

The Ties That Bind (Stereo mix)

MAOS1 (Mobile Aural Observation Station1) is the first work produced by Auricula,  a new collaboration between sound artist Cathy Lane and textile artist Tessa Brown.  We aim to produce low-impact, sustainable spaces for aural and visual reverie. These integrated sonic structures are designed to  offer an  immersive, sensory experience which reverses the usual relationship between the seen and the heard and give an alternative and abstracted approach to everyday experience. The aim is that all our structure should be self contained without the need for external power sources etc and thus be capable of installation everywhere and anywhere.
 MAOS1 was developed specifically for Brunswick Park, London, SE5 as part of Camberwell Arts Week 2011 as a temporary  space designed to offer   a different sonic and visual experience. We invited people  to step inside, make themselves comfortable, listen, watch, relax......
MAOS1 is a mobile site-specific listening space in which real time external sounds can be experienced anew mixed with a spacialised multi-channel sound piece (a small 6 channel playback system with 24 speakers  is integrated into the structure ) composed from sounds previously recorded from the site  making it almost impossible to differentiate between the real time and the composed. 
  The site offered challenges in terms of structure, materials, concept and content. Initial listening research revealed that this seemingly peaceful inner London square whilst primarily notable for birdsong, the sounds  of tennis games and dog walkers was totally sonically dominated by airplanes on the flight path into Heathrow. When questioned local residents claimed never to have noticed the planes even though there was rarely more than 1 second when you couldn't hear one. MAOS1 was designed to allow listeners the to experience this (often familiar) soundscape anew. Comments in the visitors book included “Kind of strange mixing/differentiating the inside and the outside. What a lot of planes!” “Makes me hyper-aware of the lives ambient sounds.....” “Too many planes in this city most definitely”  “Interesting – lovely view and lots of plane noises- thank you for the experience” 

MAOS1 stereo mix

Watch Over Us All 12'
This piece is part of a larger project (hebrides-suite.co.uk) that attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound.It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebridesas well as material from existing oral history archives.

On Sunday mornings the streets of Stornoway are quiet, really quiet. Almost nothing is open, after a long battle a limited ferry service started in 2009 – Sabbath observance is still almost total. The few pools of activity belong to church going – the odd car or community minibus turning up to offload its passengers, the sound of solid Sunday shoes on pavements as their owners walk determinedly to the Free Church of Scotland.

Religion is still a significant factor in the life of the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides. While the southern islands of Benbecula, South Uist and Barra are predominantly Roman Catholic. In the Northern islands. especially Harris and Lewis, the non-conformist Free Church of Scotland and the still more conservative Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland are very influential. There is a tradition of Sabbath observance and few shops or transport services are available on Sunday although this is increasingly contested.

Of course religion in the Outer Hebrides is a lot older than that St Columba is said to have brought Christianity to the islands in the 6th century and the ruins of early religious building can be seen throughout the islands.

I went to specifically try and record aspects of a Hebridean Sunday. I wanted to record the sounds of churchgoing in Stornoway and the sounds of unaccompanied psalm singing (precenting) floating out of the church. You don’t get to stand outside a free church for long though – I was invited in to both the morning service in Stornoway and the evening service at Back, both services were full to bursting and am extremely grateful for both experiences. The skylarks singing above the ruined 13th century church on the machair at Howmore, South Uist get the last word however.

Watch Over Us All (Extract)

This piece is part of a larger project (http://hebrides-suite.co.uk) that attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebridesas well as material from existing oral history archives.

It’s not easy to get to the Outer Hebrides. They are surrounded by beautiful but treacherous, crystal-clear cold seas and are a long way away from the Scottish mainland: Lochboisdale on South Uist is over four hours sailing time from Oban and Stornoway on Lewis is almost three hours from Ullapool.

The ferry services are currently operated by Caledonian MacBrayne (CalMac) and the sound of the announcements in English and Gaelic, the throb of the engine, car motors, the strain of ropes and the clang and scrape of the heavy metal ramp on the port as well as the greetings and farewells of passengers along with the culinary joys of a macaroni cheese pie are familiar to any traveller to the islands.

Since 1942 a programme of causeway and bridge construction has improved connections between islands and has helped, in some cases, to slow or reverse population decline. John and Mary Maclean talking about the ‘new’ causeway between North Uist and their home island of Berneray (a small island of about 130 inhabitants in the Sound of Harris) which was opened in 1999 tell me “it’s opened the place out completely” making everything easier but they also point out that it has also changed the island forever – as a result of the causeway the school on Berneray has shut down depriving the islanders of the regular sounds of children’s playtime.

Prior to the 1940s travel between the Uists and Benbecula was by horse-drawn cart at low tide accompanied by an expert guide giving rise to the Gaelic saying FAOTHAIL MHATH DHUIBH (A good ford to you). Islanders were reliant on puffers – small flat bottomed cargo ships to deliver essential supplies and take goods off the islands for exports.

You can fly to Barra, Benbecula or Stornoway but where’s the fun in that?

Sea Shanty Extract

This piece is part of a larger project (hebrides-suite.co.uk) that attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides as well as material from existing oral history archives.

Crofting life on the islands of the Outer Hebrides has always been intimately connected with the sea – as a source of food, myth and legend.

As you travel north from Tarbert, Harris the road climbs up hugging the coast. Rounding the headland and turning inwards towards the wild interior of the northern part of the island there is a view across the bay to a single chimney overlooking the sea at Bunavoneadar, the last vestige of Harris’s lost whaling industry. It was started by Lord Leverhulme a previous owner of Lewis who envisaged a more prosperous future based on fishing rather than crofting.

The whaling station was successfully run by Norwegians employing local people at various times during the twentieth century and finally closed in 1953.

Today, as Seonag McVicar recounts in an interview with Caitriona Maccuish, the main local fishing catches are lobster, crab and shellfish which are mainly sold to the foreign market. Whales can however be spotted around the coast and occasionally one gets washed up on a deserted Hebridean beach.

In 2006, I sat looking through the misty soft rain towards the ruined chimney and listened to a ship motoring into the sea loch below, almost right up to the whaling station, lifting lobster pots. A little further up the road is the spot where on two separate cycle tours from the south to the north of the Outer Hebrides I was defeated by a mixture of horizontal rain and a ferocious headwind and gratefully turned around and headed back towards Tarbert and the gentler south. On one of those journeys I remember the sound of a weaving loom from inside a shed as we passed it on the road.

Where Once Were  Whales includes the voices of  Donald MacSween of Ness and John Maclean from Berneray recorded by Cathy Lane; Seonag McVicar talking about working on fishing boats as part of the Taigh Chearsabhagh oral history archive in Lochmaddy and Curstaidh Mackay reciting a rhyme about food (particularly shellfish) boiling times which was recorded in 1977 by D.A. MacDonald for the School of Scottish Studies. The waulking song ‘Cha Deid Mi Do Dh’Fhear Gun Bhata’ (I’ll Nor Go to a Man without a Boat) was recorded in Benbecula by Alan Lomax in 1954 and tells of the superiority of the skipper of a fishing boat over other men.

Where Once Were Whales (Extract)

This piece is part of a larger project (hebrides-suite.co.uk) that attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides as well as material from existing oral history archives.

The wind is ever present in the Outer Hebrides activating sound in everything: - in the trees at Stornoway castle; blowing dried leaves down a deserted road on a empty Stornoway Sunday; in the reeds at Luskentyre, Harris with wild geese flying overhead; making the gate at the ruined and deserted Ormacleit Castle, South Uist sing a song that is repeated and varied in numerous gates, fences and sheep pens all over the Hebrides; whipping up a huge surf at beaches all over the west side; making the empty of containers at Griminish harbour on North Uist rattle and thunder; driving wind turbines mad …….and constantly buffeting the microphone from all sides.

In 2006 I visited the Communn Eachdradh Nis (Ness Historical Society) on the West side IMG_2708of Lewis. In between searching though the immense amount of material on croft histories as well as videos of herring girls, hand spinning and road dances, Alison Brown and Mairi MacKenzie (who was kindly translating from the Gaelic) chatted to me about the proposed wind farm which I had seen the plans for in a shop front in Stornoway. At that time apparently almost every one was against this proposal for a huge amount of windmills stretching across the moor from Tolsta to Ness which would be able to be seen from the Ullapool - Stornoway ferry as well as heard over a wide area. These plans for one of Europe's largest windfarms on Barvas Moor were rejected by the Scottish government in early 2008. In 2012 a much smaller (36 instead of 181 turbines) and relocated scheme to land west of Stornoway was given the go ahead.

Nowadays every inhabited island seems to have at least one community hall for concerts, ceilidhs, Scottish dancing, sales of work, yoga etc and many of them are running from their own wind turbines.

Gaoth’ is one of the many the Scottish Gaelic words for ‘wind’. The Outer Hebrides are the most strongly coherent Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) speaking area in the world. Gaelic is a Celtic language related to Welsh, Cornish and Breton. In the 1901 and 1921 censuses, all parishes were reported to be over 75% Gaelic speaking, By 1971 most areas were still more than 75% Gaelic speaking and it remains a relatively strong in spite of a continued decline. In the 2001 census 61.1% of the population of the Outer Hebrides spoke Gaelic (compared with 1.2% in the whole of Scotland). A handful of Gaelic speakers can be found in the United States, Canada and Australia most of whom are descended from nineteenth century emigrants.

Gaoth (Wind) 9’59”

Gaoth (Wind) (Extract)

An old piece (1998) which takes its inspiration from all things watery.

Bath

BEAM is a sonic investigation of the ‘hidden’ maritime world that delivers our everyday life - the clothes we wear, the fuel in our cars and the food we eat. Despite the fact that 90% of everything travels by sea we know or see very little of the world that surrounds it. 
Working with students from Srishti College of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India. we conducted intensive research and sonic fieldwork in Kochi centred around its harbour and the five lighthouses on the Kerala coast that communicate with all sea going traffic coming in or out of Kochi harbour. We recorded places where cargo is packed, loaded, unloaded and inspected and all aspects of the fishing industry from small scale fishing with the famous chinese fishing nets to the industrial scale capture, sale and packing of fish. We listened to the sea in many of its moods and talked to past generations of people who arrived in Kochi by sea from other parts of India and the world, many of whom  made their living shipping spices from India. We  climbed lighthouses, pondered their poetic and arcane relationship with the sea and all who sail upon it and we have listened to the radio communications between ships and land. 

The resulting installation is interactive - our recordings are controlled in real time by the AIS (Automatic Identification Signal) data that is transmitted from the ships which are now in and around Kochi harbour. This is an short stereo extract from that multichannel installation originally exhibited:
 Dec.  2014 ‘BEAM’, interactive multichannel sound installation in Srishti Interim, UB City, Bangalore, India in
Feb 2015 ‘BEAM’, interactive multichannel sound installation  Dialogic Assemblages, Artry Gallery, Kochi, India. A Kochi-Muziris Biennale collateral event

BEAM Kochi extract

Am I Here? for eight-channels of recorded audio and live performer(s).   In Am I Here? Cathy Lane takes the listener on a journey through time and space – from sounds of the stone carvers of Mahabalipuram, the Bangalore laundry ghats and the temple of Madurai in South India through the glacial lagoons of Iceland to birdsong in a domestic garden in inner London stopping off in Chile, Italy, Norway and Scotland along the way to question the nature of “here” and “now”. Her live speaking voice is mixed in with recordings of the places that she has recorded in in the past as well as her recorded voice from other times and places. 
‘Am I Here? gently questions the nature of a recording and the various degrees of embodied or disembodied presence in a recorded artefact.  It challenges the commonly held belief that field recordings are an ‘objective document’ and reasserts the inability of the recordist to escape their own physical and subjective presence.
This version of Am I here? was made for RADIO OUTSIDE: A PHONOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD  a project by Dramaturgie Sonore au theatre which toured Quebec Province, Canada and broadcast online in October 2017. http://radiodehors.dramaturgiesonore.com/le-projet/

Am I Here? (RADIO OUTSIDE) Stereo Extract 1

Am I Here? for eight-channels of recorded audio and live performer(s). In Am I Here? Cathy Lane takes the listener on a journey through time and space – from sounds of the stone carvers of Mahabalipuram, the Bangalore laundry ghats and the temple of Madurai in South India through the glacial lagoons of Iceland to birdsong in a domestic garden in inner London stopping off in Chile, Italy, Norway and Scotland along the way to question the nature of “here” and “now”. Her live speaking voice is mixed in with recordings of the places that she has recorded in in the past as well as her recorded voice from other times and places. 
‘Am I Here? gently questions the nature of a recording and the various degrees of embodied or disembodied presence in a recorded artefact. It challenges the commonly held belief that field recordings are an ‘objective document’ and reasserts the inability of the recordist to escape their own physical and subjective presence.
This version of Am I here? was made for RADIO OUTSIDE: A PHONOGRAPHY OF THE WORLD  a project by Dramaturgie Sonore au theatre which toured Quebec Province, Canada and broadcast online in October 2017. http://radiodehors.dramaturgiesonore.com/le-projet/

Am I Here? (RADIO OUTSIDE) Stereo extract 2

The Memory Machine was an interactive installation which was developed in collaboration with Nye Parry. It had two different manifestations in 2002 and 2003 in each case it played out a changing composition of sonicmaterial specifically chosen totriggerindividual memories in the listener. These memories were then recorded into The Memory Machine and became part ofthe ongoing musical mix that in turn both triggered more memories and were recorded as an memory archive. The changing composition comprised different memories being released into the mix and as they repeated at various intervals different processes were applied to them so that as time went on they becamefragmented semanticallyindistinct and the musicality of the speech became increasingly emphasised in an attempt to mirror some of the workings of individual memory.
In 2003 The Memory Machine was part of the British Museum's 250th anniversary exhibition The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures and developed as a multi-channel installation with the exhibition's curator . The British Museum were keen to collect an archive of people's individual memories ofthe museum.We conducted interviews with museum staff to start The Memory Machine offand over the 6 months of the exhibition The Memory Machine collected over 8,000 oneminute memories. 
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=335695

Memory machine BM 2003

The Memory Machine was an interactive installation which was developed in collaboration with Nye Parry. It had two different manifestations in 2002 and 2003 in each case it played out a changing composition of sonic material specifically chosen to trigger individual memories in the listener. These memories were then recorded into The Memory Machine and became part of the ongoing musical mix that in turn both triggered more memories and were recorded as an memory archive. The changing composition comprised different memories being released into the mix and as they repeated at various intervals different processes were applied to them so that as time went on they became fragmented semantically indistinct and the musicality of the speech became increasingly emphasised in an attempt to mirror some of the workings of individual memory.
It was first shown at Cybersonica in 2002. In this version the aim was to trigger memories in different categories. The sounds that were used to do this related to major historical and cultural events of the previous 60 years such as television theme tunes, pop tunes, radio news broadcasts etc

Memory Machine Cybersonica

NB. This version is a stereo mixes of the original 8 channel work. 

Hidden Lives2: the House of Memory was commissioned  by the Stoke Newington Festival as a site specific multi-channel installation. It was played through 8 unseen speakers installed on the roof of the semi- derelict Clissold House in Clissold Park over the festival weekend. The work was inspired inspired by aspects of growing up in Hackney, East London in both the past and the present. The piece took oral history material in the Hackney Archives and the Hackney Museum as its starting point. These interviews had been recorded at various times and were of varied recording quality. They also reflected the specific areas of interest of the interviewer in the choice of subject and the choice of interviewee. Out of a wide variety and hours of material I chose  material relating to childhood and in particular childhood games and augmented this with  present day recordings made with, and of, Hackney children - particularly of playground games and chants and sounds that reflect aspects of their worlds. The sonic imagery and music in the piece is designed to create a mental link to each listener’s own childhood memories and feelings about growing up.
Thanks to Hackney Museum, Hackney Archives, The pupils and staff of Colvestone School, Stoke Newington Festival, Clissold Park and The University of the Arts, London for their support and co-operation. 
The version you can hear is a stereo mixes of the original 8 channel work. 

Hidden Lives2 - the House of Memory

Hidden Lives explores ideas of the house as the repository of memories, and of women as the curators of memory and of hidden histories. The daily repetition of domestic routine tasks is common to women, in particular, across centuries, societies and cultures. Through carrying out this invisible work women have shaped and sorted cupboards, rooms, all manner of dwelling places, and the inner lives of societies and cosmologies. At particular times they have been, at once, confined to the  inside the house to carry out unrecognised and exhausting domestic servitude and at the same time able to colonise the ‘inside’ as their own, the place for daydreams and memories.

All the material for this piece is drawn from a selection of women reading from  “The Book of Hints and Wrinkles” a small piece of social history from the 1930s which describes how women should manage both their houses and themselves in no uncertain terms. The daily routine timetable is enough to ensure that no woman could ever spend much time outside the house or away from this backbreaking schedule, and advice on personal appearance is delivered in such a way as to suggest that women are in fact part of the furnishing of the house to be polished, scrubbed and generally to look clean, welcoming and attractive.

‘Hidden Lives’ is one of  a series of  tape works which explore the compositional use of space and gesture as a metaphor for physical and emotional experiences. It attempts to use the distribution, movement and gesture of sound in space in order to emphasise and highlight possible the associative qualities of the recorded material according to personal experience. 

Some of the specific ideas that inform the composition of ‘Hidden Lives’ are in the treatment of the text which moves from the whispers and breaths of memory to half articulated emergent sentances to the mantra of the repetative routine which becomes like a wall of orders and commands. 

The piece was commissioned by the Institut International de Musique Electroacoustique and realised in their studio in Bourges, France.

‘Hidden Lives’ is in celebration of all lives lived and forgotten .

Hidden Lives

'Invisible Crowds' is about personal experiences of space, particularly mental and emotional space. 
It is expressive of contradictory feelings of wanting solitude but of wanting company; of wanting peace but being unable to stop for long enough; of wanting the space to concentrate and work but being beseiged by a thousand and one conflicting thoughts and feelings. It moves at different times from repose to restlessness and back again. 
The sound material is recorded exclusively from metallic objects and  the rich associations of bells, alarms and gongs are used to underpin the emotional states expressed in the piece.
Rosemary Butcher choreographed "Destructive Navigations" a short dance work to 'Invisible Crowds'. The piece, made in collaboration with artist Pablo Bronstein, was premiered at the Festival of Minatures at Sadler's Wells, London in 2010 
http://www.sadlerswells.com/show/Rosemary-Butcher-Festival-of-Miniatures

Invisible crowds

This composition is an multi-faceted exploration of food as a material, a commodity and as a sounding substance. It also aims to explore  the many  relationships between food and sound from their basic ephemerality to the links and metaphors that tie them as materials to be processed and transformed - from ideas of "mixing", "chopping", "cutting" and "blending".

Mixed, cut and blended together in this 'ear-piece' are sound recordings, from both the UK and India, of  food being prepared and cooked, of the places where food is grown and sold, of people and companies selling food and food products and of people talking about food that reminds them of home and childhood and foods that they like to cook and how to prepare them. 

The research for this piece into personal and  global food culture  included looking into how food, spices and materials have been and are still central to colonialism and how political exchanges have influenced food, food preparation and taste. This seems particularly pertinent in India where battles  between small producers and agribusiness which have, by and large, been long lost in Western Europe are very much current and where strong regional food cultures seem to still be holding up  against  and possibly enriched by cultural invasions from Europe and the US.  I am also interested in people's emotional investment in food - as a carrier of memory and of ideas of "home". 

Much of the composition of this work has been made using Deja Vu a software program designed in collaboration with Oliver Bown originally  for dealing with recorded spoken word material. Deja Vu (an interface built on to OMRAS)  takes short section of sound as a "material text" and search through sound files to find other sounds in the recording mentioned above, that are sonically similar in their texture or pitch shape disregarding of context, subject or origin.  Composing with spoken word material and with 'real world' recordings have been long held practices of mine combined with an interest in memory and how this can be both triggered and preserved in sound. 
The work was originally made as a composed installation for a group show called  Material Texts at Kashi Art Gallery, Kochi, India in early 2009. 
This track can also be found as part of Issue 6 at Soundwalk Editions. Soundwalk Editions features artists and composers who use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work. (http://www.soundwalk.com/blog/category/editions/)

Thanks to all the interview participants, Srishti College of Art, Bangalore, London College of Communication, Sujata and Anurag at Rainforest Retreat.

The pickle jar is her home

This piece is part of a larger ongoing project (http://hebrides-suite.co.uk)  that attempts to both explore and communicate something about&nbsp; history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound. It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides&nbsp;&nbsp;as well as material from existing oral history archives.&nbsp;
This section is loosely woven&nbsp;around &nbsp;aspects of&nbsp; the crofting lifestyle past and present. It starts on the machair (a Gaelic word that describes an extensive low-lying fertile plain which is one of the rarest habitat types in Europe.&nbsp;Almost half of all Scottish machair occurs in the Outer Hebrides) and in particular the machair around Sollas a small crofting township in North Uist.&nbsp;There are references to&nbsp; the importance of the machair to supporting crofting lifestyles in terms of the plants, crops, animals and birds that can be found there (including&nbsp; a recording made one night in 2004 of a corncrake with sheep and an accordian player at a party on the beach far in the background). It refers to the kelp industry&nbsp; which,&nbsp;along with the herring industry,&nbsp; supported a population of &nbsp;93,000 in 1841 (present population is around 26,000, about half the size of the seaside town of Hove).&nbsp; It then moves on to sheep&nbsp;which largely replaced people on the machair after the clearances&nbsp;when thousands of families emigrated to Canada, New Zealand and Australia&nbsp;in the nineteenth century&nbsp;due to a mixture of&nbsp;force&nbsp;famine, crop failure and the demise of the&nbsp; kelp industry.&nbsp;Part of the recording here is of a&nbsp;mobile&nbsp; sheep sale which travels around the islands visiting small townships.&nbsp;&nbsp;
In 1849&nbsp;&nbsp;33 constables were sent from Oban to Sollas to stand by as a population of 603 were forcibly evicted.&nbsp; A plaque on the Sollas machair commemorates this and celebrates how the existing 10 crofts except one have been occupied by the same families for the last century&nbsp;
" around us the Sollas landscape provides a heritage of ruined houses and fallen dykes, a poignant and permanent reminder of nineteenth century feudal oppression, clearance and emigration".&nbsp;
The voices are those of&nbsp; Donald MacSween of Ness, Harris, John and Mary Maclean from Berneray&nbsp; recorded by Cathy Lane and Lachlan MacQueen of North Uist who is talking about the clearances around Sollas in Gaelic.&nbsp; &nbsp;Lachlan was recorded by D.R. MacDonald in 1974 for the oral history archive at the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh.
A paper about this work can be accessed at ww.shimajournal.org/issues/v5n1/h.%20Lane%20Shima%20v5n1%20114-127.pdf


On The Machair

Anybody who has ever had an intense relationship with another person will know that for every positive emotion experienced there is a corresponding negative feeling. Nesting Stones is based on my feelings about my relationship with my baby daughter. 
In this composition I am using and developing anecdotal structures and gestural metaphors harnessing the sense of spatial positioning and movement and the tension between the recognisable and stated and the barely recognisable and unrecognisable to explore and express the contradictions and dualities of that relationship. 
The sound material for the piece is all drawn from recordings of myself and my daughter. 

Nesting Stones was written in 1996. In 1998 featured on Unknown Public Issue 8: Sensuality Essence And Nonsense  and as a result was chosen as one of the Wire magazines "100 Records That Set The World On Fire" along with works such classics as  Steve Reich's 'Come Out', Alvin Lucier's 'I Am Sitting In A Room' and Glenn Gould's 'The Solitude Trilogy' as well as works by  Louis & Bebe Barron,  Youssou N'Dour,  William S. Burroughs, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and Herbie Hancock. 

"Stockhausen's Gesang Der Junglinge features the voice of a near-infant boy. Nesting Stones doesn't seem so different: a mix of musique concrete and electronic treatment, featuring the cry of Lane's own child Mia. What's so striking is how insipid and even cowardly Stockhausen's pioneering work suddenly seems, how carefully the young Darmstadt modernist (who had just become a father) distances himself from any of his own feelings about child-as-sound (above all, imposing some irrelevant biblical material on the work). Mia's yowling, by contrast, is looped and treated until its primal empathic pull (she's calling "Mama") folds into maddening repetition, strain and ugliness. Even as the sound mutates into gurgles and chuckles - everything we're programmed to respond positively to - the baby manifests as parasite, as cancerous scrawl, as chaotic insistent thing. A simple idea, on the face of it far from new, and yet - in this age of child abuse panic and false memory syndrome - far more powerful, daring and revelatory than almost any Electronica or concrete I can think of."
The Wire #175 September 1998 



Cathy Lane 1996


Cathy Lane - Nesting Stones 
(Unknown Public 8/Sensuality Essence And Nonsense 1998)
Stockhausen's Gesang Der Junglinge features the voice of a near-infant boy. Nesting Stones doesn't seem so different: a mix of musique concrete and electronic treatment, featuring the cry of Lane's own child Mia. What's so striking is how insipid and even cowardly Stockhausen's pioneering work suddenly seems, how carefully the young Darmstadt modernist (who had just become a father) distances himself from any of his own feelings about child-as-sound (above all, imposing some irrelevant biblical material on the work). Mia's yowling, by contrast, is looped and treated until its primal empathic pull (she's calling "Mama") folds into maddening repetition, strain and ugliness. Even as the sound mutates into gurgles and chuckles - everything we're programmed to respond positively to - the baby manifests as parasite, as cancerous scrawl, as chaotic insistent thing. A simple idea, on the face of it far from new, and yet - in this age of child abuse panic and false memory syndrome - far more powerful, daring and revelatory than almost any Electronica or concrete I can think of. MSi


Nesting Stones

This piece is part of a larger project (http://hebrides-suite.co.uk) that attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through sound.It uses a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebridesas well as material from existing oral history archives.
The voices and recordings in 'Tweed' were recorded over a number of visits to the Outer Hebrides, remote islands off the North west coast of Scotland. The first voice, of weaver Catherine Campbell, was recorded in her weaving shed and shop in Plocrapool, on the east coast of Harris.She is proud of her independent status as a weaver who “doesn't work for the mill” but works for herself. The next voice heard was recorded in a weaving shed near Callinish on Lewis in 1998 as the weaver tried to show me and my friend how to us the Hattersley loom. Threaded inare various atmospheres, voices and mechanical sounds from mill at Shawbost, Lewis recorded in 2006 just as it was about to be sold. As well as the various machines for the washing, drying, dying and spinning of the yarn the weavers are heard explaining some of the physical elements of weaving many of which form spatial templates for the treatment of the recorded material in the composition.

A paper about this work can be accessed at ww.shimajournal.org/issues/v5n1/h.%20Lane%20Shima%20v5n1%20114-127.pdf


Tweed

In combat with.... was an experimental work  made for the 2010 exhibition 2010 Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs at IMT Gallery, London in  2010. 
It was relatively recently that I learnt about the 'inner voice'.  I don't think I have one. At least not one that talks to me in 'words'. When I am not talking or listening or actively 'thinking' I realise that I am often completely blank. OK - occasionally something pops into that blankness - something I haven't done, or have to do, a train of though, an idea......sometimes a song or a rhythm goes round and round in my head but I'm not sure that I would way it's a 'voice' and most of the time it's not there.
Since discovering the concept and existence of the inner voice I have asked people about theirs - What is it like? What sort of things does it say? Who is speaking? One voice or many? I have discovered there are many kinds of voices and people are very often reluctant to reveal them. Is the inner voice a truer reflection of the self - or is it one of many viral invaders insinuated into us from the media, our parents, outer space or our evil twin? 
Fortunately a close and generous friend of mine has a very very active inner voice and often entertains me with  running commentary of her inner thoughts - a marvellous mixture of obsession,  mundane observations, self criticism and surreal reflection already cut up, looped permutated and processed in her head. 
I recorded the workings of her inner voice on a number of occasions.  An outcome  of this experiment is the certain realisation that  many of the things that someone says to themselves or even the things they say to friends are not things that they would want recorded and played to acquaintances or strangers (in the same city) so I have rejected much of the material. "In combat with..." mainly uses recordings from one occasion when I dropped round early one morning for breakfast.




In combat with .......

'Listening and not listening to voices: Interrogating the prejudicial foundations of the sound arts canon' is an peer reviewed audio paper first published by Seismograf (https://seismograf.org)in `November 2017. It was based on a keynote lecture given at 'Sound Art Matters', a conference held in Aarhus, Denmark in 2016.

Abstract
We live in sound, it is all around us. We are implicated in the social relationships and ideologies that we hear reflected back to us. Sound art offers the chance to critique the world that we hear, and to produce new and different possibilities. Are sound artists taking up the challenge of offering new ways of knowing or changing the world, and does this need new ways of listening and understanding? Can sound art act as a tool for radical change by ‘de-conditioning’ our listening and helping us cross linguistic, cultural, geographic, ethnic, gendered, specied and sexual prejudicial borders? This audio paper will consider how new listenings might lead to a richer, more inclusive sound art, that can embrace and celebrate difference.

Bibliography
Feldman, S. (2008) Speak up: Why do women screech when men shout? Available from Rationalist Association, http://rationalist.org.uk/articles/1858/speak-up [accessed 1.12.13]  
Heddon, D. (2008). Autobiography and performance. Hampshire: Palgrave.  
Hooks, B. (1990) Marginality as a Site of Resistance. In Ferguson, R. et. al.(Eds.) Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press 
Hooks Bell interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ShWJf8BIqI accessed 24.3.2017 
Lane, C.  (2011) Listening for the Past: A composer's ear-lead approach to exploring island culture past and present in the Outer Hebrides. In http://shimajournal.org/issues/v5n1/h.-Lane-Shima-v5n1-114-127.pdf  
Lane, C. (2015) Sandy Jaffas (sound work). Courtesy of the author 
Lane, C. (2016) Mapping the Outer Hebrides in sound: towards a sonic methodology. Island Studies Journal, 11(2): 343-358. 
Serres, M. (2008) The Fives Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies  (translated Sankey, M and Cowley, P) London: Continuum. 
Stadler, G. (2015) On Whiteness and Sound Studies https://soundstudiesblog.com/2015/07/06/on-whiteness-and-sound-studies/ [accessed 25.5.2016] 
Stoever-Ackerman, J. (2010). Splicing the Sonic Color-Line: Tony Schwarz mixes postwar Nueva York. Social Text 102:28:1.  
Schwarz,T. (1955) Nueva York: A Tape Documentary of Puerto Rican New Yorkers, Folkways Records 
Viv Corringham (voice) & Maggie Nichols (voice) at Mopomoso free improvisation night. Filmed by Kostas Chondros at the Vortex, London, on 21 December 2014 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqQDr5n_X54 [accessed 2.1.17]. 
Wright, M.P. (2013) (video work)  A proposed vocabulary exchange. Courtesy of the author.

Listening and not listening to voices

Lapped Translated Lines was a  multi-disciplinary collaboration between choreographer Rosemary Butcher, artist-filmmaker Daria Martin, Post Works (architects Matthew Butcher and Melissa Appleton) and composer Cathy Lane.  The sound work was originally 52 minutes long and composed for a multi-channel speaker array. It focuses on minimal electronic sounds with field recordings made by Butcher in New York during her research when she returned to retrace some of her early influences. The choreography was created by Rosemary Butcher and born out of discussions with dancer Elena Giannotti about Darwin and the skeletal structure and morphology of animals. The internal senses of performer Elena Giannotti are amplified using sound and video. Daria Martin’s film captures the resulting performance in impressionistic fragments and powerfully depicts the inner world of the dancer as she navigates her way through the piece. Post Works’s sculptural framework of steel and light acts as a viewing frame, delineating the edges of the performance space, and a register against which to view the physical movement of the dancer. Celebrating the processes of translation and transformation, the work expands on the inherent slippages that occur between one language, physical state, space or discipline to another.
Lapped Translated Lines was premiered at the Lillian Baylis Studio Theatre, Sadler's Wells, London as part of the Festival of Miniatures in October 2010.
Video extract at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEd3ezRijww

Lapped Translated Lines (2010) Stereo Mix Extract 4

Extracts from a 25 minute work composed in collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Butcher. 

Performers
Henry Montes
Paul Clayden
Deborah Jones
Lauren Potter

Lighting
Anthony Bowen

Selected performances:
Tanzquartier, Vienna, Austria
The Place, London, UK

Video extract
https://vimeo.com/49455225

Reviews
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/rosemary-butcher-company-robin-howard-dance-theatre-the-place-london-5360624.html

Slow Still Divided (2002) extract 1

Extracts from a 25 minute work composed in collaboration with choreographer Rosemary Butcher.

Performers
Henry Montes
Paul Clayden
Deborah Jones
Lauren Potter

Lighting
Anthony Bowen

Selected performances:
Tanzquartier, Vienna, Austria
The Place, London, UK

Video extract
vimeo.com/49455225

Reviews
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertain…n-5360624.html

Slow Still Divided (2002) Extract 2

Here We all Are (Lucier Mix)(extract) 
For a long time I’ve been thinking of what a feminist re-working of Lucier’s “I Am Sitting In A Room” might sound like. It’s a great work but I couldn’t help but wonder about Lucier’s position as the only sound in the room, the male artist apparently voluntarily isolated and cut off from the rest of society with his voice becoming more and more re-enforced and literally bouncing back at him from his environment reflecting only him. I wanted to see what happened when my voice was looped over and over again into the outside world so that it combined with the sounds of the other people and the other species that I share space with. 
In March and April 2020 the UK went into lockdown to try and slow the spread of the virus C19. The inner cities everywhere became quieter as traffic and planes decreased. The weather was unusually warm and sunny. Birds sang and insects buzzed. In my part of East London where the small gardens of terraced houses are divided from the neighbours gardens on three sides by fences, you could hear but not see the various activities of your often unknown neighbours at various points of the day and night. Many people no longer were allowed to go to work but worked in the garden, played with their children and  enjoyed being outside. 
All recordings Here We all Are (Lucier Mix) were made during the start of this time while sitting in the same position in my garden in Hackney, London in late March and April, 2020. 

I am very grateful to Vanessa Rossetto for inviting me to contribute to AMPLIFY 2020  quarantine and giving me the chance to try out my ideas. 
The full 16 minute track is available on AMPLIFY2020 Bandcamp https://amplify2020.bandcamp.com/album/here-we-all-are-lucier-mix?fbclid=IwAR20pdja4wEyF_nPe4vqOp-i5OY6rEK_neOAVV9D_n6MjFImgNvpClHy8vM

I am grateful that live in a house with a garden. 1 in 5 people in the UK live below the poverty line and many have suffered during the lockdown 
Any financial contributions from Here We all Are (Lucier Mix) will be donated to the Hackney Food Bank  https://hackney.foodbank.org.uk/

Here We All Are (Lucier Mix) extract

Preparations for an Imaginary conflict is a multichannel sound installation which was originally commissioned for “Staging Disorder”, an exhibition which considered the relationship between photography, sound art and modern conflict. Using recorded material UK public information media, oral history, archival news, texts and specific geographical sites, the work examines the rhetoric of war which has been used by successive generations of politicians to prepare the public for a possible attack or to build up the idea of the hostile ‘other’ in a number of real and fictional

Preparations For An Imaginary Conflict (stereo Mix)

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist and academic. Some of her  work uses spoken word, field recordings and archive material to explore aspects of our listening relationship with each other and the multiverse.

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