Salford's Hidden Canal

W3W - ///pets.chose.grass Composers: Anne Louise Kershaw and Selma Ebbens “Cold in the Hand” is one half of a sonic diptych and worksong: “Cold in the Hand, Veins Blood to the Root”, two lines from one poem, co-written through a collaborative model made to mirror the form of what is seen and create in flow stating all that’s not. Played in two parts to top and tail the Hidden Canals project walks. Two end brackets telling a twinned tale of lives lived full and lost to archive, folklore, fast fading memory and faster shifting technological states.

“Cold in the Hand” sounds on a site of a church whose border, unshifting and hallowed, forced essential canals to angle around. An assertion now seen by the train track line only and the carpark’s square boarders within which you stand. The canal, the stories, the graves all paved over, “Cold in the Hand” is a story of voices - our labour of love for the love that was laboured, and for love labouring still to reveal and honour a history right here that can help to connect us.

Layering the piano and guitar of one, and the multiple synthesizers of the other, both artists threaded deep the meaning in this rare chance to combine sound, social history, linguistics and archive to celebrate and create sonic form into flow.

Utilising site specific field recordings gathered from the different canal sites of Salford, newly digitised previously unheard before oral history archives - voices from another time to sound within ours anew and afresh - brand new poetry created using verbatim from these tapes, combining traditional Lancashire vernacular and the language of Friesland, representing the two artists who created it, as well as canal phraseology to form a brand new lexicon of solidarity, collaboration and hope, to sound, sing and honour every voice speaking out across time and give volume to the world full of water that lay hidden within us.

W3W - ///axed.quit.polite Composers: Ugne Makselyte and David McFarlane So Below is the next part of the two-part collaborative work "As Above So Below". This piece is dedicated to a location where the canal does not currently exist - it was once there, but is now deep underground. This Reflection on this situation is inseparable from the fundamental relationship between human (civilisation) and nature. On the one hand, the destructiveness of this relationship is evident (the legal and official underestimation and disregard of society's natural need for green/blue zones in the city is a prime example). On the other hand, it is clear that there is also a lot of love in this relationship, reflecting green activism and the voice of the public calling out to nature, naturalness and organics. The water canal in the city, which was once there and is now buried under concrete, is a tragic experience for society, which is mourned in this work.

This work uses field recordings, vocals and various sound processing techniques. Here we concentrated on playing with the recognisability of the natural sound source in this way, exploring the human manipulation of natural resources. Inherent in this is the emotional response - the vocal melodies inspired by folk laments reflect the individual's reaction to the chaos in nature caused by the whole of humanity, the direction of movement of civilisation. In other words, in this work, nature reflects its own suicide.

The compositional structure is based on a rotation between less processed field recordings with natural sounds and their radical processing, which makes it impossible to identify the sound source. Everything is unified by vocal lines. Some of the vocals were recorded together with water, in a meditation designed to use the recorded flux of water as an accompaniment (at the beginning of the piece). The other vocal part (in the middle of the piece) was created using the sounds of birds as an accompaniment with an attempt to mimic birds or respond to them. This part pales into the heavily processed sound of water, while the transition to the more abstract and textural, "deconstructed" part of the work starts with a recording of fireworks, also reflecting a certain part of the destructive relationship between humans and nature.

W3W - ///tight.intervals.alarm Composers: Anne Louise Kershaw and Selma Ebbens “Veins Blood to the Root” is one half of a sonic diptych and worksong: “Cold in the Hand, Veins Blood to the Root”, two lines from one poem, co-written through a collaborative model made to mirror the form of what is seen and create in flow stating all that’s not. Played in two parts to top and tail the Hidden Canals project walks. Two end brackets telling a twinned tale of lives lived full and lost to archive, folklore, fast fading memory and faster shifting technological states.

“Veins Blood to the Root” sings by a sound of water still remaining, along with the steel bridge bolder older lasting than the tunnel it once held safe. Water feeds reeds succeeding the boats that once barged here. Still birds sing bold all glad of the growth they, as we, can live within. “Veins Blood to the Root”” is a story of voices - our labour of love for the love that was laboured, and for love labouring still to reveal and honour a history right here that can help to connect us.

Layering the piano and guitar of one, and the multiple synthesisers of the other, both artists threaded deep the meaning in this rare chance to combine sound, social history, linguistics and archive to celebrate and create sonic form into flow.

Utilising site specific field recordings gathered from the different canal sites of Salford, newly digitised previously unheard before oral history archives - voices from another time to sound within ours anew and afresh - brand new poetry created using verbatim from these tapes, combining traditional Lancashire vernacular and the language of Friesland, representing the two artists who created it, as well as canal phraseology to form a brand new lexicon of solidarity, collaboration and hope, to sound, sing and honour every voice speaking out across time and give volume to the world full of water that lay hidden within us.