Musical compositions

How can we traverse
a landscape, when
thinking about sound?

The image shows a wide panorama of a barren landscape under a moody, overcast sky. The foreground is dominated by dry, brownish shrubs and sparse vegetation, likely gorse, scattered across the uneven, grassy terrain. The horizon stretches far into the distance with minimal elevation, where a few solitary, leafless trees stand against the darkening clouds. The overall atmosphere is desolate and bleak, suggesting an approaching storm or recent rain on this chalky, windswept landscape.

The musical piece documented here, 'Coastal Process', is in nine sections. Each responds directly, yet differently to this unique landscape. It is made up of three main sound elements: Field Recordings; a generative string section, and a live improvising performer.

Coastal processes

Coastal processes are continuous. Their daily rhythm spans hours. Their effects accumulate over millennial spans of time or, in times of dramatic acceleration, overnight. Coastal processes function at the scale of molecules of water and grains of sand, which aggregate to outline the boundaries of nations.

A vertical journey upwards from a single beach pebble through earth’s atmosphere to the tropopause scales the geological and geographical dimension of a coastline. But what is the equivalent in time? The millisecond to the millennium? Both spans explain something about coastal processes, which are eternally and simultaneously micro and macro.

The coastal system of Spurn Point almost renders these scales perceptible. At least, it offers an illusion of comprehensibility. It’s both small yet vast; tangible yet ungraspable; constant yet changing. It is certainly a fragile landscape, yet it certainly endures.

Field recordings

The substrate of the piece is formed by nine 5-minute field recordings made during a Transect Walk on the Spurn peninsula on March 20th, 2024. Immerse yourself in the world of sound. Listen to our field recordings.

Generative strings

The generative string section presented here is made up of 8 instruments each of which has 8 components, forming 8×8 grids for each section. Once initially triggered by the performer (in whole or as individual elements), the string section continues to cycle through, automatically selecting and triggering the next component to play. As this process happens in each of the 8 instruments, the combination across the section changes each time.

Live performer

In the recordings presented here, the improvising musician is the composer: Mark Slater. He responds through improvisation on piano to the simple tetrachord that is offered in the piece’s notation for each section. This tetrachord undergoes a slow process of change over the piece in an analogous way to single pebbles rolling diagonally southwards on the tide.

Although captured here in a performance for piano and strings, Mark’s piece is purposefully composed for any instrument/voice or any combination of instruments/voices alongside the pre-recorded sound materials that are performed using the software package, Ableton Live.