Sing the gloaming: a landscape soundscape
A Professor of Language works with two visual artists and several recording artists to explore etymology, evolution, and landscape in an installation for Sonica festival, Glasgow.
Scattered around The Hidden Gardens, a small community space in Pollokshields, Glasgow, are curious geometric, brightly coloured boxes. They look uncanny, unusual, and somehow landed from another time or place. Quietly, they are making a sound. Sometimes unrecognisable, sometimes on the cusp of communication, sometimes simply becoming rhythm or aural shapes. They are installed here for Sonica Glasgow, a festival exploring sound art in place.
They are sound sculptures created by Simon Kirby, Tommy Perman, and Rob St John, and their work Sing the Gloaming explore the evolution of language, and particularly words relating to light. There is a curiosity that many words beginning with GL relate to light: gloaming, glare, glimmer, glow, glisk, gloom, gleam, glisten, glitter, glaze, glass, glance, glimpse, gleam, glint.
These are a phonaestheme cluster, all rooting back to the Proto-Indo-European *ghlei- wordform, meaning shining, glowing, and warmth, and ancestor to many of the GL words above. Proto-Indo-European was a language spoken around the Black Sea 5,000 years ago, and which fed into over 400 languages spoken globally today, and its that evolution of a form which the artists are exploring in this installation.
The singers include Scottish vocalists including Aidan Moffat, Emily Scott, King Creosote, SHHE, Hanna Tuuliki and Andrew Wasylyk, each given one of the words to sonically explore and play with to develop, as Tommy Perman says, “a chain of emerging melodies and connected spontaneity”.
Within the foliage, the sculptural objects have no speaker holes, instead the sounds are within, vibrating the whole form and creating a quiet, concentrated noise which might be coming from the nature itself. The words take on a new life, melting into the overgrowth. The landscape too evolves, as the words and light change, aurally and visually glimmering through leaves, the alien objects slowly conceal into the site and become a part of the place, just as oddities of language become comfortable and mundane through repeated use.
Place, just as language, is formed of natural and man-affected evolution. The landscapes we inhabit now may at first glance seem ancient, but it’s only through an archaelogy that an understanding of the root can be understood, as etymology can with language.
These are a phonaestheme cluster, all rooting back to the Proto-Indo-European *ghlei- wordform, meaning shining, glowing, and warmth, and ancestor to many of the GL words above. Proto-Indo-European was a language spoken around the Black Sea 5,000 years ago, and which fed into over 400 languages spoken globally today, and its that evolution of a form which the artists are exploring in this installation.
The singers include Scottish vocalists including Aidan Moffat, Emily Scott, King Creosote, SHHE, Hanna Tuuliki and Andrew Wasylyk, each given one of the words to sonically explore and play with to develop, as Tommy Perman says, “a chain of emerging melodies and connected spontaneity”.
Within the foliage, the sculptural objects have no speaker holes, instead the sounds are within, vibrating the whole form and creating a quiet, concentrated noise which might be coming from the nature itself. The words take on a new life, melting into the overgrowth. The landscape too evolves, as the words and light change, aurally and visually glimmering through leaves, the alien objects slowly conceal into the site and become a part of the place, just as oddities of language become comfortable and mundane through repeated use.
Place, just as language, is formed of natural and man-affected evolution. The landscapes we inhabit now may at first glance seem ancient, but it’s only through an archaelogy that an understanding of the root can be understood, as etymology can with language.
fig.ii
Simon Kirby is Professor of Language Evolution at the University of Edinburgh, and elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Simon’s academic research is concerned with the origin and evolution of language, and the unique ways that culture and biology interact in our species. Simon has collaborated on a range of widely exhibited artworks including Etiquette (2007), Three Pieces (2008), Cybraphon (2009), End of Forgetting (2011), #UNRAVEL (2012), Tasting Notes (2013), Great Circle (2014) and Concrete Antenna (2015). Cybraphon won a Scottish BAFTA in 2009 and is now part of the permanent collection of National Museums Scotland. With FOUND, he won the List Award for “outstanding contribution to Scottish Arts”. Simon was included in the Sync List of people “doing remarkable things in the space where technology meets arts”.
www.simonkiby.net
Tommy Perman is an artist, designer and musician with an interest in the spaces where these three disciplines meet. He has exhibited extensively and released lots of records. Tommy lectures in Communication Design at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee.
www.surfacepressure.net
Rob St John is an artist, writer and academic. His interdisciplinary work often involves landscape writing, art-science collaboration, sound recording and film-making, and has been shown at Tate Modern, London, Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and Stour Space, London, alongside numerous publications and releases. Rob is a PhD researcher in cultural geography at the University of Glasgow, working on art-geography exchanges, Anthropocene landscapes, and György Kepes’ interdisciplinary practices and publications at MIT in the 1960s.
www.robstjohn.co.uk
The Hidden Gardens is a beautiful public oasis located in the Pollokshields area of Glasgow. It is urban greenspace where you can relax away from the busy city streets, discover nature, get creative and connect with friends and neighbours.
A legacy of NVA Europe, The Hidden Gardens is an environmental artwork which has become an urban greenspace of international repute rooted in its local community.
www.thehiddengardens.org.uk/about
Sonica Glasgow is a biennial festival celebrating visual sonic art and showcasing 200 events by over 85 artists from 10 countries.
www.sonic-a.co.uk
images
fig.i Montage recording of Sing the Gloaming installation, The Hidden Garden, Glasgow.
© Will Jennings
fig.ii Sing the Gloaming trailer. © Simon Kirby, Tommy Perman, & Rob St John
publication date
17 February 2022
tags
Glasgow, The Hidden Garden, Installation, Simon Kirby, Landscape, Language, Music, Tommy Perman, Sonica, Sound art, Rob St John, Words
fig.ii Sing the Gloaming trailer. © Simon Kirby, Tommy Perman, & Rob St John
publication date
17 February 2022
tags
Glasgow, The Hidden Garden, Installation, Simon Kirby, Landscape, Language, Music, Tommy Perman, Sonica, Sound art, Rob St John, Words
