Black Water Brown Water

Black Water Brown Water is a multi-format phonographic sound work, which takes an island that separates the river Severn from the Staffordshire and Worcestershire canal at the Stourport Canal Basins as its point of departure.

Presented as an imagined dialogue between James Brindley, the iconic canal engineer, and Sabrina, mythical Goddess of the River Severn, the piece uses the literary, territorial and economic histories of the site for which it was made as a lens through which to explore these respective water systems and the myths that represent them.

The piece contributes insights into the study of the relationship between text, voice and sound, into the use of extant historical sources in the devising of a site-specific sound work, and insights into the translation of site-based works into other contexts of performance and dissemination., The piece is informed by a tradition of acousmatic music that integrates narrative text into a musical discourse (Chion, Calon et al) but is distinctive in that it largely eschews transformative signal processing in favour of phonographic approaches to sound design, achieving its compositional ends largely by means of highly choreographed recordings. This approach to the phonographic dimensions of the work, coupled with the integration of poetic writing, expands significantly upon established approaches to the site-specific binaural ‘sound walk’.

The piece is submitted in its original site-specific headphone version, as a stereo version published with a book and as an 8-channel concert piece. The stereo version has also been broadcast over 25 times worldwide via the RADIA network.