A site-sensitive community engagement soundscape, commissioned to be playable from a touchpad in the multi-faith space in the Grange University Hospital, a critical care hospital opened in November 2020 in Llanfrechfa, Gwent, South Wales.

extract from 20 minute composition

Volunteer Musicians: Rod Paton, Clare Parry Jones, Mandy Leung, Peter Geraghty, Abby Charles

Sound of the Breeze Song of the Waves (extract)

Using the usually unconsidered sound of the clock mechanism as it strikes twelve, other elements are introduced in order to create an intimate, darkly surreal, experience that invites the hearer to become a Listener, and consider what part time plays in our accelerating social complexities.

Witching Hours (extract)

'in(ex)teriors' is based on raw material of field recordings and voice reading text. A sonic imagining of influential supernatural/horror writer Arthur Machen's (1863-1947) semi-autobiographical novel 'The Hill of Dreams', the field recordings were made in the area around Caerleon in Gwent where Machen was born. As in Machen's writings liminal spaces between ir/rationality and un/realities appear and are explored, as well as links between written/spoken word, music, nature, emotion and imagination.

Alchemy, magic, folklore and superstition still resonate within Western Europe and reside deep within Celtic culture, despite our supposedly civilised rationality and pragmatism. Since cave painters depicted humanimals, since story-tellers shape-shifted, since cinema, video games, virtual reality used their own ‘magic’ to create otherworlds, audiences have reacted and responded. Sound has been central to creating these reactions. Machen’s writings abound with Sound, both descriptively and in the musicality of his style.

Written during the late Victorian period of major widespread societal and technological change 'The Hill of Dreams' depicts the struggle to understand and make sense of profound disturbances, including the fear of the unknown - themes that cross time and remain relevant.

3' 44" of 14' 35"

in(ex)teriors    (extract)

Following a grant from PRS Foundation's Women Make Music in order to create the 8-channel sound installation 'babblesnatch', Leona was awarded the Support Grant prize for its 2-channel version in The Karl Sczuka Prize 2023 for Works of Radio Art.  Selected from an open international call-out three awards are made annually for the best productions of radio art using musical material and structures in an acoustic performance.

The genesis of 'babblesnatch' happened during the Covid pandemic lockdown as Leona and her mentor composer/researcher Dr Caroline Wilkins had long-distance discussions about the rush on-line and the torrent of digital information forced to substitute for so much previously gained from live events and gatherings. Everyone virtually listened to and watched each other even more than previously, creating an overwhelming digital infostorm.  'babblesnatch' invites Listeners to use their imagination and consider what it might be like to experience the usually non-audible digital voices and moods continually enveloping us.

The 8-channel installation has been presented twice, premiering in Bridgwater, Somerset, and then moving to Newport, Gwent.

The text for the work was a performance script embedded in an earlier published academic paper by Caroline and adapted by Leona during lockdown to create the recording script. 

Voices: Caroline Wilkins and Leona Jones.
samples mix 5' 24" of 26' 16"

babblesnatch     (extract)

Denni Dennis, world-renowned Clown practitioner in the East European tradition, commissioned Leona to take part in devising 'Jeg, Hamlet' a solo Clown show adapted from Shakespeare’s play.  In the melding of movement, voice, sound and video Leona was responsible for creating an abstract hour-long 'soundtrack' for this sonically and visually poetic, surreal, immersive and interactive theatrical experience.  

Co-creation took place in the city of Almaty, the cultural centre of Kazakhstan, where all of the team-members apart from Leona are based. Sounds were organic (recorded in the city as well as relevant recordings from elsewhere) and used Denni's voice speaking Shakespeare's text in Danish.  The soundtrack is an active participant in the action on stage - another character, rather than simply mood enhancer and sound effects.  Throughout the devising process sounds reacted to and provoked developments in both visuals and movements.  

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is focused on a protagonist whose stable world disintegrates around him, and his Fools stand outside the action, seeking and observing often uncomfortable truths in the world around them.   Using a greatly reduced version of Shakespeare’s text 'Jeg, Hamlet' examines questions relevant to our massively uncertain and confused contemporary world through the prism of Clown.  Clown is allied with physical theatre and in the tradition of innocent other-worldly creatures who travel through challenging encounters with universal questions about life.  

The production is multi-lingual.  Words spoken live were in Danish, Denni's first language.  Mother-tongue is vital to a sense of self even in a globalised world, and minority languages must reach out to each other.  In future performances the language of the host country will replace one of the six, though Kazakh and English will always remain.  The visual languages were much more than subtitles, commenting on or enhancing the situation of the protagonist, as did the soundtrack.

Leona lived in Almaty for a month for the creation of 'Jeg, Hamlet'.  Her journey to and stay in Central Asia was supported by Arts Council Wales' International Opportunities Fund.  Her participation in the production would not have been possible without this valued financial support.

4' 33" extract of 59' 20"

Jeg, Hamlet   (I, Hamlet)     (extract)

Live recording.
'Unquiet' is a further exploration by Leona of site-responsiveness, focusing in this instance on the way hidden and not-so-hidden sonic elements of a place can be captured and then juxtaposed to create the ‘song’ of the space.  Taking time to listen to the empty floors of a multi-storey office block at all times of the day and night, Leona recorded the ‘voices’ of the building, ranging from majestic choral-style ‘music’ through to atmospheric percussive elements.  The sources of the sounds are not relevant, allowing the sounds themselves to become enigmatic, deprived of referentiality.  Without manipulating the recordings digitally, Leona then wove some of the raw elements together to create 'Unquiet', seeking to combine and enhance the natural rhythms and textures the building itself had produced. 
 
'Unquiet' is also an exploration into the quality of sound as a powerful signifier of many things simultaneously – emotion, experience of spatial presence, harmony/discord, passage of time, object working with/against human.  An Uncanny form seems to be created, animated by its own sounds, taking ownership of its own spaces.  

At the end of the residency, Leona invited cellist Siôn Dafydd Dawson to improvise with one of the soundscapes for an in-situ live performance.  The soundscape has none of the standard notes etc of standard ‘music’, but combined with the traditional sounds of the cello a sense of emotional interaction with the building is created, both approaches demonstrating the energy generated by textural and intuitive use of sound.  Performed on one of the storeys undergoing refurbishment, surrounded by the clutter and debris of past and future uses, the result was highly atmospheric.  Along with the concentrated attention of the people present 'Unquiet' demonstrated once again that listening is the most important part of composition.  

The track is an extract from the live performance, recorded in-situ.

The work was the result of Leona being selected to be part of the two-month residency sited on several of the then empty floors of Brunel House, a 17-storey office block in central Cardiff, Wales.  The residency was curated by Louise Ashcroft of Floating Island Gallery.

Unquiet

'What produces the impact must have soul in it and must be accompanied by an act of imagination, for voice is a sound with a meaning, and is not merely the result of any impact of the breath as in coughing.'       (Mladen Dolar, 'Voice and Nothing More', 2006)  

Leona's ongoing and developing interest in Voice led her to create the sound installation 'Th’luria' for an exhibition in Cardiff in 2016.  After recording interviews with several women artists talking about their work and their working processes, she then mixed them (without digitally manipulating them) to produce the site-responsive installation.  Interested in the various vocal devices the interviewees had used, both conscious and unconscious, as they attempted to verbalise some very personal and intuitive processes, Leona later re-mixed one of the interviews to form '...what else to say...'. 

Voice continues to express even when words fail, when it’s hard for the speaker to verbalise, during times when Voice becomes a limited conveyor of meaning through language and reverts to something altogether more primitive.  It’s during these times that the listener can discover meaning in a very different, extralinguistic, way.
  
This piece is composed using only artist Sheila Vyas’ voice, not digitally altered in any way.  Leona chose Sheila’s voice not just for its specific qualities of modulation, cadence and inflection, but also because Sheila’s drawings powerfully reference the buried and conflicting aspects of the human psyche.

...what else to say...

‘The spoken word is always an event, a movement in time, completely lacking in the thing-like repose of the written or printed word.’     (‘Orality and Literacy, The Technologising of the Word’, Ong, 2005) 

fragmanin is a two-channel Audio Essay using as raw material voices discussing digital literature in order to create a sound work which explores the writing process through listening and the music-like rhythms of speech.  

Drawing on relationships between spoken, written and written-to-be-read-aloud language this experimental work was triggered by the call-out, and presented at the 4th Biennial Performance Philosophy Conference 2019, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands.  Working with the overall theme of Intoxication, the work plays with the collision of writing and live performance.  Using original recordings of academic lectures, the work twists how information is presented and experienced, emphasising how considered and constructed language on the page/screen becomes ‘something else’ when shifted from its repository.  Words and their context are de-familiarised and reconfigured to leave logocentrism behind, offering a fresh opportunity to listen, experience, reflect, and wonder.

fragmanin

a site-sensitive eight-channel audio installation 

The culmination of Leona’s residency at the Museum of Bath at Work, Somerset, ‘Born For It’ is a two-hour work created from samples from the oral history archives and sounds contained in the building itself.   Sound is acknowledged as proof of the creativity inherent in human labour, both paid and unpaid, as work and as leisure, and also as evidence of effort within a particular hardware shop, a pop factory and associated industrial workshops.  However, not just artefacts are held within the Museum’s walls.  There are memories, associations, relationships, dissonances, connections and disconnects.  ‘Born For It’ is a work that borrows from what’s around it, mingling tangible and intangible, so that everyone can hear something of themselves, and perhaps hear it differently.

The eight-channel work was created for the main gallery in the Museum, previously a Real Tennis court, turning it into an immersive listening space.  Twenty voices twist and turn through roles and times from late 1800s to 1980s.  The Museum’s sounds blend with each other, blend with the voices, a reminder that we are all born for work in a world that is constantly in flux, with the potential for transformation, connectedness and collaboration.

Time refolds when listening to archive recordings, and the listener is placed in the moment of decades ago as people speak with no expectation of being interrupted, talked over, silenced; listening becomes dominant.  Audio histories bring distant events close because of the manner of speaking.  Individual nuances of accent and expression communicate what words alone cannot.  What is heard is embodied sound as vital and unique individuals lean forward into fluency, disappear momentarily into themselves, grapple for words that can never fully describe, allowing the listener a relationship with something much more hidden and profound than information giving.  Space is left for Imagination, a chance to create enriched worlds, forming relationships with people, places and situations never personally experienced.  Placing vocalising in a space where it’s unexpected uncovers another realm, one of echoes ofechoesof echoes… Individualised meaning emerges from always-fluid sounds montaged onto the consciousness of the listener.  

This extract is part of the 2-hour work, condensed into two channels.  The full work played on a loop throughout the Museum’s opening hours for a two week presentation.

Born For It (extract)

Leona works with words, her own and found recordings, and utilises spaces both personal and public  &#13;
Definitions are questioned &#13;
Unnoticed boundaries highlighted and crossed&#13;
Repetitions and assumptions becoming jumping off points&#13;
Allowing trajectories away from print and page into installation / audio / digital / performance and visual arts&#13;
Practice and theory meld(mould)ing space physicality locationcontext to fire words with new meaning&#13;
Fluidity not fixing&#13;
It's all about happening&#13;
It’s all about WordsSoundsSpaces&#13;


WordsSoundsSpaces

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