Cold In The Hand

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.