Lighthouse (2011)

Stereo piece, duration 3’01”

This piece was made for Café Concrete and Folkstone Fringe’s “International Lighthouse Relay”, using sounds from Smeaton’s tower given to me.

Two types of source sounds – people visiting a lighthouse, and knocking onto the metal structure found on the site. A literary space, full of imagination, but also of loneliness. Accentuated by an utterance about claustrophobia which forms the introduction of the piece. This sound is transformed into a sensation of wind or the sea, contrasted with the dull reverberance of the enclosed tower. The otherwise disparate sounds are forcedly mapped onto the rhythmic tapping, as if constructed by the memory of a compulsive mind. We move into the ‘head space’, eventually ending in a sort of oligophrenic closed loop.

Lighthouse