Blanc Sceol

Summary: Blanc Sceol is a London-based sound art duo comprised of Stephen Shiell and Hannah White. They use sound and listening to experience and express the world around them. They create performances, recordings, and compositions, with Stephen also making musical instruments. They blur the boundaries between audience and performers and often engage in participatory happenings. They are certified deep listening practitioners and run workshops and sound walks in public spaces. Deep listening allows for a judgment-free exploration of sound and movement, fostering group experiences and embracing diversity. They were introduced to the work of Pauline Oliveros and have been practicing deep listening for several years. It allows them to connect their interest in meditation with their sound work. Transcription: Hello, you're listening to the Audio.com podcast, where we hold up a mirror to the sound world by speaking with musicians, authors, curators and other practitioners about nearly everything relating to sound, audio, instruments and listening. I'm Ilya Rogachevsky. This is our first episode and today's guests are Blanc Sceol, the collective name used by the London-based sound art duo of Stephen Shiell and Hannah White. Stephen and Hannah work together across many disciplines including performance, composition, participatory action and deep listening. Their compositions, interventions and performances are anchored in their surroundings and directly respond to the landscape. As certified deep listening practitioners they also regularly run workshops and sound walks that explore listening and sound making in public spaces. Blanc Sceol's practice often relates to water. The piece you can hear right now is an early work called Seven Tides. It is a composition made from field recordings, sound objects and tidal data from the coastal town of Margate. The duo's most recent work, released by Café Otto's Otto Roku label, is called Orbit. Originally commissioned by Radio Amnion, a station broadcasting sound works deep into the ocean during the full moon, the Orbit is also an instrument as well as a sound piece, but we'll hear more about that later. I met up with Stephen and Hannah on the Channel Sea River in East London on a hot summer day in 2023. We discussed their sound art practice, ecology work with the Surge Co-operative and talked about World Listening Day, which is happening on the 18th of July this year. We're sitting on a boat on a very warm day on the Channel Sea River, which I can see trickling down in the middle there, it's coming in, so the tide is out and mostly what we can see in front of us is mud, the riverbed, basically. And I'm sitting on a boat with Blanc Sceol, Stephen Shiell and Hannah White, a sound art duo. Is that how best to describe you guys? Yeah, why not? I want it better. Yeah, no, it is. Yeah. Let's give it a go. What do you guys do? And when did you start doing it? I think that we, we, I know that we use sound and listening primarily as ways to experience the world around us, which lots of people do, and ways to express back what it is that we find interesting. We make performances and happenings and recordings and compositions and Stephen primarily makes a lot of instruments. I use voice and text and yeah, we kind of, I guess, construct our experience of place using those elements and hopefully create a kind of other space for the audience to, or whoever the participants are in the piece we're creating, to kind of come with us into realms beyond our daily life. I've been an artist, well, it's that weird thing, isn't it? You're always being creative throughout your life as soon as you draw your first breath. I primarily taught myself to be a sculptor. And then from there, discovering sound art, I was kind of actively discouraged to make music at school. What was the experience like where you were discouraged? It's called class war. Tell me more. Well, it's just that, you know, a certain group in society aren't supposed to make music. They're supposed to listen to it and consume it. But, you know, as you learn, like in art school, you know, the boundaries get dissolved and actually the things that you're being taught, like primary in school, aren't exactly the education that you can have. And you meet many people that inspire you and you learn from your peers and from certain people and individuals who come, you know, come across like art tutors that, you know, there was a, I never knew there was a thing called sonic art or phonic art. And there was an amazing department at Middlesex University. And I went there and I realised actually I can make music. I can use sound. You know, music is very sculptural. So I really got on with it really a lot. And when Hannah says I make musical instruments, I've made musical instruments over a period of time because they're expensive. And if you can't afford to buy something, actually the fundamentals of making an instrument, you can make a saxophone out of a cardboard tube and a paper cup, a balloon and a straw. And as long as you know your kind of measurements for tuning, you've got a saxophone. It might not be the one that, who's the most amazing saxophone player, he probably wouldn't want to play one, but he probably would make it sound like amazing. So that's what my interest is, like kind of making instruments that's been there and using like kind of, you know, the techniques of field recording or everyday sounds into compositions or into the idea of transferring someone into another space through a way of listening has been our primary interest. We've been making work for each other for like 10 years now. And we actually met through working together on a theatre show and I was just thinking about that kind of background. So I studied drama and I studied music when I was younger, but I think there's definitely a theatrical element to our work in some sense that we were talking about today. And I think that there's a sort of sense of sculpting a physical sound space. Like there's some, there's definitely a sense of creating a performance space, not necessarily with props and sets and things, but creating place with sound. Like a situation? Yeah, I suppose so. And then working also in place and that translating into the work. There's a drive in us to perform and want to perform with the audience and to have a relationship with each other. And we find that within our own communities, especially within the sound art scene in London and throughout the UK, it's quite a small group of people really. And it's quite nice to feed off of each other and interact with each other in different ways. I've made some wonderful relationships with people through watching them perform and then seeing me perform and then maybe collaborations come from that. So there is that kind of sometimes need to kind of create a kind of a scene around yourself. I think it's a search for energetic transfer. And so we obviously find that with each other. And then we find it with others in that performance space. Yeah, I'm quite interested in sort of blurring those boundaries of audience and performers. So more participatory happenings or yeah, the deep listening work and workshops and like feeding into the workshops and ecology work that we're doing on the river here. So it's all sort of flowing into each other. Most people, I feel like we're just, we're not living, we're just responding always to life problems or what's being thrown at you. But sometimes we can get to stop and actually live and respond to each other in a more meaningful way. I feel like art, music, drama, all of those creative energies is where we're at our best. I guess it's also a question of access and knowledge. And if you're not aware of deep listening practices and the sort of history behind them, then maybe it's not as easy to dive into it or maybe easier to discard it as something a little bit silly or whatever. But speaking of deep listening, can you talk about how that feeds into your practice? Because you do sort of meditation workshops and you mentioned working on the river. So what is deep listening for somebody who's not come across that idea before? There's a wonderful thing in it that's called lift off judgment. Hello Jane. And when you delve into that, it's that kind of thing of like lifting off judgment of yourself that you can participate. I think you're your own worst critic. I think in deep listening, it kind of allows you to make a sound and make a movement to spontaneously work with others and realize actually through group participatory work that you're all having different experiences together. And that's okay. And to be all like a monoculture that we kind of are being told to live in isn't quite the real world that we're all living in. So deep listening for us and while we facilitate it is partly a selfish act, because I like the work. I love working in this way. So we've been meeting for the last two years at Fawnsea Flats for the full moon. We do that because it persists and we don't have to choose a day if the moon chooses it. And you get various people coming throughout the season. And through lockdown, we did a dark moon one, which was quite nurturing, quite revealing. And it was quite international with lots of people from all around the world tuning in to it. But we were introduced to the work of Paulie Oliverus by a good old friend many years ago, many moons ago of Artu. Since then we've been practicing it. It's been a nice journey. I remember when Artu first invited us, he said, oh, we're going to go and practice some sonnet meditations in Springfield Park. And I was like, oh, what's that? Sounds interesting. And I've always been looking for some kind of meditation practice, feeling it happen through making music and sound and wondering what that link was. And I remember reading a text that he'd sent just before we went and did that. And that really made sense to me. It created that link between what I had been on the peripheries of in terms of maybe some kind of meditative practice, but not really finding a way in, but feeling it in the sound work. And then suddenly there was this practice that really brought those two things together in a very open way. Not anchored to any particular practice, although, I mean, Paulie Oliverus was a practicing Buddhist, so of course there are Eastern influences in there. But yeah, I suppose the particular time she was in, in the 60s, of course that was happening. But she managed to frame things in such a way that was so sort of human and non-boundaries that sort of covered all bases somehow. But yeah, as you say, it's a beautiful way of coming together to listen to your inner stories and the outer stories and the environment in a very kind of equalizing way. You know, you practice sitting in a circle, which is one of the most sort of important things about it in some way. And like you said, sharing off each other's different, very different experiences and perspectives, but finding a common space of shared listening and sound. We had a wonderful one where it was like questions, wasn't it? Like we had to choose a sound that was familiar. And then we discussed what sounds we would choose as a group. It was the sound of a kettle boiling. And then you meditate on what the sound of a kettle boiling means to you. And like, maybe an hour later, we're chatting, and our in-depth conversations of all aspects of your life are linked to making a cup of tea, which sounds so English, doesn't it? But it's so ingrained in like loads of things of emotion and chats and connections and, you know, anyone who feels in a certain way will remember that that sound actually has such a weighted kind of memory, which I find quite fascinating. And, you know, we were an international group doing that. And tea making itself is actually, you know, many cultures have their own tea making rituals and ceremonies. And of course, tea has this social and political history that was very interesting for us. Anyway, that's another. I feel like ritual is a very important part of your work. What does it mean to you? We're actually writing a little bit about this at the moment and kind of talking about it and trying to understand it ourselves, I guess. And I think I've been sort of coming up with some questions about like, what part can co-created ritual play in the times we're in now and the difficulties we face in terms of climate change and global change and adaptation? I think we both have our personal rituals and practices in a daily life, which I think everyone does if they actually look at what they're doing daily. There are always those things that you do that that help you feel a certain way when you need to. And I think we approach performance and sound making in a sort of ritual way without kind of consciously knowing it. I think it's quite conscious. The first breath you ever take is a ritual. I celebrated my birthday two days ago. We're surrounded by rituals all the time. Even if it's not your own birthday, it's someone like Jesus. Or it's somebody who's made an impression on the world. We've just gone through a whole series of coronations, haven't we? Of pompous and ritual to stamp an ideology on the rest of us. You know, look how much money they spent on bringing in a king that's not wanted. But to ritualise something in some ways is to honour what you're doing, and to be aware of a consciousness that you're producing or creating something from within that you're sharing with others, that others actually can join in with or appreciate. So, for the last I don't know how many years, we've been celebrating Art's birthday on the 17th of January, which was first kind of introduced by Robert Filiu when they discovered the amazing paintings in France, in the caves, that Art was born and was a million years old. The sponge fell into a bucket of water. The absurdity of the ritualised idea that any everyday thing could be an antidote of the carnage that is Christmas. We do the 17th of January, which is highly rewarding and quite cathartic in the sense that we create a ritual around Art and celebrating Art, and that you can burn your Arts Council application, or you sometimes burn the effigy of the Arts Cultural Minister. It's kind of sowing seeds of that year of what you'd like to kind of happen for you. Yeah. And if you think right now, the need for the archaic is becoming more prevalent. The Green Man Festival in Hastings has become massive. If you go back 10 years ago, it was tiny. Lots of the like the mice dance is becoming more prolific. Folk stuff is becoming more prolific. And I feel that the reason, the need for it is because we've kind of lost our way a little bit. Maybe our political classes have kind of muddied the water so much that we're kind of not sure who we are. So then we end up looking back a little bit and looking at what did the past generations do? They were like dancing around maypoles and sticking bells on and whacking sticks and balloons. And in it, there's these ritual elements to kind of cherish the elements that all live inside you, that are part of you. And the way at the moment, the world's being presented as it's in trouble, that there's climate change, that there's what you talked about that maybe a bit of earth worshipping is needed, you know, like a bit of connection to nature is actually what we deserve and desire. And actually, the ritual is a really good way of kicking into that. And the same with deep listening that, you know, it's a wonderful tool to, to connect, you know, through through sitting in a forest or in a field or in a park, and letting life slow down for a minute that you actually realise that you are connected and things are kind of okay. And actually, there are no ways of dealing with the situation that we find ourselves in. So ritual plays a really important part in that. Definitely. It's about I think, this human search for meaning in this sort of hyper capitalist version of things that we find ourselves in. That search for meaning maybe is becoming more and more and more urgent and important, because if nothing means anything, then why kind of care or, or take care of it. So I also think it's about love, love for each other and love for everything. In fact, yeah, I mean that in a very, actually very kind of concrete way. We all know if we don't actually love something, we won't take it into our daily lives and kind of be on board with it. So I think ritual can play a very important part in bringing people together to connect with place, to engender real and actual love and care and therefore change and good adaptation. That would be my hope anyway. I think that neatly brings us on to the Channel Sea River. What connects you to this particular place? It's coming in now, isn't it? It is coming in. Oh wow, yeah. Twice a day it comes in, four hours is when it leaves, ritualistically, on time, always. The ritual of the tide, yeah. You have to kind of work with it, which is quite interesting, you think you have to adapt around it like how a canal works, where you can just be on it all the time. It kind of teaches you a little bit that we've kind of changed nature to ourselves so much that we're not working with it anymore. So when you're in a tidal river, you really have to bend to the river. You only can be on it for a certain amount of time. But the reason why we're here, we have helped set up another space on this stretch, this tidal lee that the Channel Sea ends up into the tidal lee that ends out into the Thames, which is why it's tidal. We helped set up a place called Cody Dock. We worked there for a while and then we kind of moved on from there and set up a boating boat. After a few years of negotiations, the timescales were different. We're still talking to those people. Al and Ruth, who live on this boat here, who are co-directors with Hannah and myself, they found a sympathetic, what would you call them? A landowner? A landowner that has access to the river. They were happy for the boat to be here and then they moved in. That was four years ago. Since then, we've been working with Thames Water and the Council to create the first moorings for Surge Co-op. In that four years, me and Hannah have done a lot of learning with this river, learning a lot about its position, its disposition. Right now, we're sitting in the northern outfalls, so those conduits there is where they used to pump the sewage into the river, which went into the Thames. This is Basil Jett's pumping station, which is where sewage treatment works would work. It's actually quite a fascinating achievement of human genius and still works today. Most of the toilet waste that comes from all of our toilets, it's primarily water cleansed. It goes into the sewers, ends up in these pumping stations, it goes through a sewage treatment, which is the pipe through the greenway. It goes through about three different stages and then comes out as clean water into the river. This fertiliser for the land is an amazing achievement. It was brought about because cholera was rife in London and a solution needed to come together. People worked really hard and this was born. It's only through privatisation and the disaster of allowing the extraction of cash from a monopoly, which the water industry is a monopoly, that it's been polluting our rivers and our seas. Otherwise, it's a brilliant system. It's just greed that gets in the way. This river, we thought it was really polluted. It's just been mismanaged. Actually, it's quite healthy. We've been having a great time learning with it, creating a practice around it, enjoying sharing it with others and learning. Right now, we've got a pump over there where we're chatting with Thames Water about setting up the long wall ecology garden, which is this strip over here that me and Hannah have been closely working with and with other members of Surge. We wanted a tap because we were going to plant some trees. They were like, yeah, we can give you a tap for Thames Water. Thames Water are great, by the way. I'm not going to have a garden. In the end, they were like, we can't give you that. What we could do is we could buy you a pump and you could pump it out of the river. Then they were like, well, no, no, we can't do that. We can't do that, but we can give you some money towards it. And so from them, we had a little bit of cash. And then from the mayor, we got some cash. And then Al, who's quite a great engineer with the technology that we have right now, he was able to put together an amazing pump that now pumps water out of this, which is the Chelsea and makes it completely clean and you can use it to wash. We've even made it to the point where it's drinkable, right? And we have free water. And it's all solar panelled and it's got power over there now. So we have the technology to do really good things. And Thames Water are well happy. We're happy. Great solution that they said no to a tap. But you learn something from someone going no. I guess on a personal level, we at one point were going to possibly move on to a houseboat, which is why we got, and through friends and Stephen being artists and residents over at Cody Dock and being involved there, yeah, brought us to setting up this lorries co-op. But I think over the time since we set it up, for us, it's very much become about the river itself. And the river kind of has this being that we're being with and what lives on and around and in it. And then I think also this, yeah, the Longwall Ecology Garden is this learning journey around, like you're saying, around the kind of possibilities of off-grid living, actually, is strangely in London. We're also building a compost toilet over there. So we're sort of building this place that's self-sufficient in amongst, you know, this city and these systems, which we're all beholden to in some way in an urban environment. And so, yeah, it's really interesting to be able to make these systems that are released from that. And that we can, yeah, we're a bit like pirates somehow. Do you feel that the occupying, being like present, you know, like, you know, Tim's also went to a certain age now, like Sarty and Sarty, and come up with a really good PR campaign, because we're terrible at the moment, we've got really bad reputation. And what can we do? You know, they probably wouldn't come up with, well, get some people to live on it. So, you know, you could talk about ecocide, or you could talk about like pollution, bad management of the land and of rivers and our waterways, because this is our drinking water primarily, in the end, even if it goes through lots of filter systems and whatnot. And then people are going to live here. And that's quite fascinating to think like in, you know, we're about to sign a 125 year lease, there'll be six or seven boats here. And they'll be kind of guardians of this space, they'll be the first ones to know when things are going wrong. And it feels like that that's what, from a lot of people's perspective, this is what we kind of need is that people kind of looking out for or being a part of the systems that we're we're living in. And then from that, we ended up having some interesting conversations with authority. And instead of taking the stance of, yes, you're awful, or you're to blame, or your generation did it wrong. And we now have to pick up the pieces and the mess, we've taken the approach of collaboration and working together, which I think this came a bit about through the deep listening work and working with the river. You know, we've negotiated with the PLA to turn this stretch of the river into a community land trust into a community asset, which from the perspective of the people around here becomes like a cherished of a thing that can't be sold or developed on or or misused or mismanaged, actually. And you probably could say that it's probably it's healthiest it's been in a while apart from the fact that they cut it off from its fresh water source, which is kind of a sad thing. And if they propose that today, they would never have done it. But they, in the 70s, early 80s, I don't know what was going on in people's heads, but they they filled in the river, just beyond that bridge, they literally filled it in. And that ends up becoming quite an interesting conversation with a few deep listening walks with that, walking the dry bed or the bed that's been filled in through into the Olympic Park, where a bit of it was still remnants, there's a bit on the Jubilee line, there's a little bit in the Olympic Park and up towards Temple Mills, little segments that didn't get filled in. And in tracing those steps, it becomes quite an interesting sound walk, right? We do it silently. And at the end, some very interesting conversations come about through just being with and sitting with those those decisions that were made. So it's been a great teacher, this river. I've learned and unlearned a lot of things, which has been been great. And then trying to do it together, like it's like setting up a co-op, like herding cats is difficult. I think some of the issues that we have today is that it is always difficult and a bit awkward working together. And actually, it's better, because it might take a bit longer. But in the end, I think we get a better result. Yeah, I mean, that's the well used phrase of Don Haraway, staying with the trouble, like you got to kind of stick with those discomforts, actually, and stay with the difficulties. Presently, undergrowth, connection, success, mystical universe, warmth, shadow intuition. Coherent, difficult, loving. You mentioned the pumping station that we're seeing across from, and it's very ornate and beautifully built. I think the architecture is Victorian. If you see a pumping station that would have been built in the last, I don't know, 50, 60 years, it wouldn't look like that at all. But the reason I mentioned is because you recorded your most recent album, Orbit, inside a similar ornate pumping station. And maybe you can talk about that album, the concept behind it, and the instrument that you built yourself in order to perform the music that's recorded on that record. So that actually is the pumping station that we recorded in. Yes. So it's Abbey Mills, and it's one of four that Joseph Bazalgette built in the 1850s in response to what's now called the Great Stink, which was essentially buildup over many, many years of pollution in the rivers, which led to cholera and many, many deaths. And the story goes that by the time that when the Great Stink reached the noses of politicians in parliament, and they had to close parliament, that was when change happened. I mean, for many years, there were many people campaigning for something to happen. And eventually there was the tipping point and this huge, huge engineering feat that Bazalgette created with these four pumping stations and a network of sewer pipes all under London, which is still mainly in use today. There's obviously some updates and there's a newer pumping station right next to Abbey Mills, which is more in use. But Abbey Mills is still operational today. And the turbines come on when there's been heavy rainfall. We've been exploring the site in connection to the Longwall Ecology Garden and building the compost toilet and learning more about those sort of waste systems. And the fact that it gets called the Cathedral of Sewage, and it was built in such an ornate way, which actually, we didn't know this until we approached. There's a mixture of all like, you know, Baroque, like, Gothic, like, all kinds of architecture from all around the world has been borrowed and put into this, this temple. Yeah. Another kind of thing that's been a long time in the pipeline was this instrument, Orbit, which maybe Stephen can tell you a bit more about, but we created this instrument. We were commissioned to create a new audio piece for Radio Amnion, which is a deep sea broadcast, broadcast two, two and a half kilometres under the sea. We built this instrument, which is very cosmic in some sense. We've been working on this river with this sort of tide cyclical time and this feeling of rhythm. And we've been working with this compost toilet and the sewer system and thinking about watery networks and flows, and then this composition to create something for the deep sea for this other watery world, which is very, very different and contrasting to this watery world. And that led us to think, well, maybe we could just ask Abbey Mills if we could possibly record in there, because apparently the acoustic is really great. So we did, we approached someone that we knew through working at Surge, who is the operational manager, and she responded immediately, very positively, because she told us the reason why Bazalgette made the building so ornate is because he wanted the public to be able to see the similar kind of majesty that he felt this underground network of pipes had, that the public would never get to see. So these temples or cathedrals to sewage were kind of built to honour this kind of incredible engineering feat of directing water and waste around the city. And what about the instrument? Well, we were commissioned by Mark Wagner to do a performance at St John's in Bethnal Green. And we did a piece surrounding the idea of a pill, which is like the run of bell ringing. And we, it was quite participatory. And then I just had this idea of like, creating some instruments that people could play and enjoy them. We built a version of the Toré by Eurapti, which I saw a YouTube video of, and then we made a Yeybehar. It's really interesting, like bass, guitar, with some big springs attached to drums. It's actually quite, quite an interesting instrument. We had lots of like cymbals and gongs and bells and all kinds of things. And we had this participatory performance that we did. And the Toré just didn't work. It's rubbish. It looked good. So sculpturally, cool. Sonically, terrible. So afterwards we went back to the drawing board, like, left about with it again. And then took it out a second time, I think for a Skronkfest. Played about five minutes at the end with it. Sounded okay, but went out of tune really quickly. And then the first time we played it for Eclectic for Acoustic, which was a little bit better. After tweaking with it a little bit, it lasted, it basically stayed in tune and lasted for about five minutes again. There's something really intriguing about it. And I love the fact that it took two people to play. So kind of put it to bed and I just did a lot more research and found that you actually were inspired by Mr. Smith-Axe's instrument that he made. What was it called? Ronda. Ronda. And it was actually quite a really lovely lineage of experiments and sculptural elements for this instrument. And over a period of five years of us doing gigs and getting 20 quid here and 50 pounds there, we saved up some money. Enough to kind of like, maybe look at this instrument in a bit more detail. So we got in touch with Claire. She's French and she's a hurdy-gurdy maker. In Ramsgate. And we went and met them and we showed them what we've made. And they were like, they were intrigued. And we kind of got on with them and their husband, Ty, who's like an amazing string instrument maker, was like, I can help you make this. And he does a lot of workshops teaching people to make guitars and any string instruments. What do they call it? A luthier. A luthier. And he was really nice. And a kid from Hackney that now lives in Ramsgate and a lovely, brilliant workshop for making musical instruments, which is what you need. Because my studio, I've got drills and whatnot. But you haven't got it set up like how you would for a professional music making project. And then we were in touch with him for like two years. And then COVID happened. And then lots of things kind of, he still, we were still talking and chatting. And he bought some wood that was amazing. It's redwood that they use for bodies of guitars and string instruments that you can hold in a certain place and you can hit it. And it sounds like a bell. It like dongs. It's so resonant. It was amazing. And he couldn't find any of the wood and then he found some and he cleaned it all up and cut it. And then he had to dry it all. So he was all these little measurements on these bits of strands of wood going like, oh, it weighs this much now. And then six months later, it weighs this much. And then at one point he was like, we're ready. And then yeah, so January this year, we spent five days with Kai. And together we birthed this instrument. We had no idea how it was going to sound. I think the first video that we shot of it, you can see the surprise on all of our faces that it worked. It was actually a real joy to kind of create and birth something from our hands and such a simple rudimentary instrument that actually has so much potential in the sense of learning its intricacies and its forms. And it's, yeah, it was just a wonderful thing to do. And the fact that it was, the fact that you just need two people to play it and you can't play on your own. It was always, it still does intrigue. Yeah. I mean, the thing about it taking two to play is really interesting because obviously we're partners in many things. And so finding that instinctual, again, energetic transfer between us that facilitates the sound coming from the orbit and feeling almost like the orbit is leading us in creating the sound. It's very hard to describe because it doesn't, it's not really cognitive, is it? What happens? We've practiced with it and developed certain techniques that we like the sound of that we then will repeat, but you can't really repeat anything in some ways, always shifting in the moment to the tiniest change in pressure or speed. So yeah, that's really interesting. It's very, it feels like a continually evolving thing. And yeah, so kind of continuing the legacy of the torii and then moving it on into being made with wood and that different resonance that that brings and the decagon shape brings a slightly different kind of rhythmic movement and the tuning. We've got a lot of control with the tuning because there's pegs and bridges that we can move up and down. So yeah, just moving it along that in that way has been really exciting to do. Yeah. And it was so fitting in some ways to use that instrument to connect it to the Radio Amiens Commission and the work that we're doing here. It felt like a lovely, it's just an interesting like set of coincidences. Yeah, for us it felt like that whole thing was just flowed very well. I mean, I don't know how it seems to other people. But yeah, for us it all just kind of fell into place. It all just happened at the right time and the right moments. But when we asked, you know, even though we have a relationship with Thames Water, it was a complete punt. We've learned that a lot of people do ask and they say no. We know Batman's been filmed in there. And I think some other things may have happened. But it's very rare. And she made that quite clear. Like, it was like a whole day there. And we worked quite closely with Ian Thompson, who's a sound artist, a recordist, who did an amazing job, did some really interesting audio sweeps in there. And who else was there helping? Oh, well, Karina Townsend and Owen Tucknot were assisting. And yeah. And Owen's like a star pupil at Greenwich University, where Ian teaches sound design. And we had Hannah Lovell there filming. Yeah. Just to do a bit of documentation. And yeah, it was great. It was great. I'd like to round up this interview with a little discussion about World Listening Day. So that is something that happens every year and has been happening since 2008, I believe. And it's sort of tied to the ideas around acoustic ecology and listening. Normally, they have a theme. But this year, they have three prompts that artists or just people in general who want to participate in World Listening Day are encouraged to respond to. And I've got them written down in front of me. And I'm going to throw these prompts out to you. And I'd like to hear your responses to them. The prompts are, what can we learn from listening practices of all living beings? How can we de-territorialise listening practices? And when should we listen more? There's so many ways to answer that, isn't there? So at the moment, we're sort of doing surveying, some slightly more scientific surveying of the river, alongside our more sensory listening practices. And those different forms of knowledge sitting side by side. I know there are a lot of global scientific studies at the moment using audio as a way to explore what's happening in landscape and how we might change our actions or adapt things in order to mitigate the devastation of the changing climate that we're experiencing. So in a way, that's sort of using these technologies that we've developed to extend our own senses to listen more deeply. And I think there's a lot that can be learned from that. But I also think that the sensory listening locally to yourself, others, and what's immediately in your environment is a really important practice alongside that more global scientific, slightly abstracted practice. And I think those two dovetailing together could be really what is important for us in this age. More feeling. More feeling, yeah. And what does de-territorialize? So that's something that comes out of critical theory, something that Deleuze and Guattari have come up with, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure that I understand that question very much. Is it in reference to decolonialism? Yeah, I guess established territories would be social constructs, and using sound or listening as a way to deconstruct them. Well, sound doesn't have any boundaries in some sense. You can't switch off your ears. There's a difference between listening and hearing. And like, sound doesn't understand that, you know, it's past a channel or gone over to another borough, or it's in some African person's head, or an English person's head, or an Indian person's head. It doesn't distinguish, right? It can't. And then in some ways, like, a lot of the listening practice or slowing down or taking our time, and realizing that a lot of the sounds that we make, that we say are not natural, like, are part of nature as well, that we are part of it. So it sometimes feels like this separation, like the sound that we can hear now, the hoover, is no different from a robin singing. It's a sound that we make, but I feel it's part of the soundscape that we're all part of, that these are just the sounds that we emanate and make, even though we do it through language as well, but we also do it through action. I don't know if that answers that question. Yeah, I think it does. I think also maybe what you're talking about is the sort of equalizing quality of listening. And that is de-territorializing, in a way, because it's a practice that expands you beyond your own perspective into the perspectives of others, or at least an attempt at trying to have a more rounded view of things. And that kind of listening practice, I think, is essential if we're going to move beyond the sort of binary divisions that we exist in now into something that is more, yeah, again, more loving or more useful for the whole of the Earth and the cosmos, in fact. Yeah, when should you listen more? Listen more, yeah, I was going to say that. When your ears are shut. When you've got headphones on. I was going to say, when things are difficult, listen more. Yeah, thank you, that's really helpful. I've got a lovely story about the World Listening Day. So before we actually started to collaborate with Soundcamp a lot, we did a World Listening Day. It was when we first moved to Forest Gate, where we live now. It was like three, four years ago. And when we moved into the area, you start to kind of like wander around, and we're lucky enough to be living next to wanted flats. And they have some of the last breeding pairs of skylarks there, the closest to the centre of London. There's some in Richmond, and there's some somewhere else. And we, for World Listening Day, we did a project where we started called Listening With, and we sat with the dawn chorus, which was part of the World Listening Day. And we listened with the skylarks, and we produced some work around some of the histories and the lyrical understanding of the skylark. Anyway, it was very, we really liked it. And then next year, we did it for Soundcamp. But right now, there's a picture of us on Leytonstone High Street, massive, on a church, of us in the space that we did this for World Listening Day, an artist that's showing that the people that interact with the ecologies of wanted flats, so from moth catchers, to bird watchers, to, I don't know, all sorts. To North African teens. We're one of them. And she saw a post about this World Listening Day skylarks piece that we did, and then approached us. Yeah. World Listening Day is a little soft spot. Yeah. And right now, you can see us mystically in a node, listening to skylarks and wanted flats. I think that's a really nice way to finish. Thank you, guys. Thank you.