Sound captions - The Architect Has Left the Building

The main focus of the RIBA exhibition with Jim Stephenson and Sofia Smith was the film, but something that excited me as much as producing my first multi speaker gallery mix was writing the captions for the catalogue. Emily Macaulay, who took care of all the visual branding for the project, suggested we might include some words to accompany the images that make up the bulk of the catalogue. It coincided with a period where I’m actively trying to improve my writing and ways of communicating the listening that I partake in on a daily basis.

Book designed by Emily Macaulay - Photos by Curtis James

I’ve spoken before about my background and lack of education and thus the lack of confidence that historically may have made me feel like I couldn’t do something like this, so I’m really proud to be included in the catalogue.

I’ve kept a listening journal since September 2023 and continue to engage with it daily. The connection and deep noticing this practice promotes has been my favorite discovery for a long time and in fact has seen me do less recording.

Flux and Phantoms

Sheltered by a concrete harbour arm and a shingle and steel embankment built on sunken ships, Shoreham Port houses a sewage treatment works, a power station, a rock processing plant, a steel factory, wharves, lorry parks and burger vans: a backdrop for swimmers, nudists, cyclists, surfers, fishers and summer picnickers.

More from my collaboration with Angus Carlyle at Shoreham Port. Flux and Phantoms is a multi dimensional broadcast experiment for Radiophrenia, a temporary art radio station broadcasting from the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow. Field recordings gathered from Shoreham Port will be broadcast at 4PM on Saturday the 26th of August, and listeners are invited to use another device to simultaneously mix in “phantom frequencies” and recreate a phenomena encountered at the site: the appearance of enigmatic drones and tones at the edges of the acoustic atmosphere. These ‘phantom sounds’ can be streamed from Soundcloud via a link below.

The hope is that listeners will experiment by playing this second layer synchronised with the broadcast, using a mobile phone or a computer - possibly a bluetooth speaker - and engaging with the spatial nature of these recordings. We’ve been testing it out and it is a lot of fun to move the second sound source - the phantom sounds - around the listening space, with the potential to collaborate with friends and use more than one  playback device.

Photo by Curtis James

To listen to the ghost frequencies which add an extra dimension to the "Flux and Phantoms" broadcast please tune into Soundcloud with another device and mix the two streams in your own space.