Exmoor Singers of London Chamber Choir

Art installation

A Record of Fear
Audio clips and photographs
Biographies

For several years Exmoor Singers has gone on a 'choir retreat' weekend, heading out of London and at the journey's end going on a small boat to a remote and secret location on the Suffolk Coast - Orford Ness. Orford Ness is a former top secret Military testing site, and now, as the the largest vegetated shingle spit in Europe, is home to a nature reserve owned and managed by The National Trust. The site is central to some very significant periods in Britain's military history and includes a number of mysterious and foreboding buildings, now derelict.

Artist Louise K Wilson was asked by Commissions East, in collaboration with The National Trust and English Heritage, to create a temporary installation for a Contemporary Art in Historic Places project. The Reserve Warden mentioned to Louise that a choir visited Orford Ness each year and had sung in one of the laboratory buildings, formerly used to test the stability of detonators for nuclear bombs. Louise was fascinated with the acoustic properties of the site and Exmoor Singers soon became an integral part of the art installation.

The project involved the choir being filmed and recorded singing in various of the buildings, including in a centrifuge chamber and stood around a Trident Nuclear Missile (decommissioned). Louise then used the recordings as part of the art installation.

The music recorded on location included two madrigals - Ward's 'Come Sable Night' and Bennet's 'Weep, O Mine Eyes' - and Janequin's 'Le Chant des Oyseaulx'. Louise also commissioned a new work to be written by Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides simply entitled 'U', for amplified choir and sine oscillator. The title refers to U of Uranium, and the text used is from George Perec (from Species of Spaces): "Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds." The choir rehearsed the work on location but it was recorded at the Lansdowne Studios in London.

The installation ran from 27 August to 1 October 2005 and has since been published as a catalogue, complete with a CD of the sound recordings forming the installation, including the following featuring Exmoor Singers:

	Ward - Come, sable night (sampled, around Trident Nuclear Missile)
	Bennet - Weep, O mine eyes (solo in centrifuge chamber)
	Bennet - Weep, O mine eyes (choir in centrifuge chamber)
	Kyriakides - U (amplified choir & sine oscillator)

Recording A Record of Fear

Louise K Wilson is a visual artist, whose work includes installations, sound pieces and videos. She has undertaken numerous artist residencies and commissions in Europe and North America and produced site-specific work in diverse public sites as well as galleries.

Wilson's work explores perceptual, social and cultural aspects of science and technology. Processes of research are central to this practice and she frequently involves the participation of individuals from industry, museums, medicine and scientific research in the making of work. Previous associations have included the Montreal Neurological Institute, the Science Museum, the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training facility in Moscow, the RSPB and the Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service.

Yannis Kyriakides was born in Limassol, Cyprus in 1969 and as a result of the Turkish military occupation in 1974 emigrated with his family to Britain. He study musicology at York University, later being drawn by the music of Louis Andriessen to move to The Netherlands, with whom he studied under at the Hague Conservatory. At that time he also had the inspiring opportunity to collaborate as composer on three projects with the maverick conceptual sound artist Dick Raaijmaakers.

As a composer he strives to create new forms and hybrids of media, synthesizing disparate sound sources and exploring spatial and temporal experience. He has focused in the majority of his work on ways of combining traditional performance practices with digital media. The sensory space where music happens is a particular preoccupation, and for this end a way of bypassing the conventional structures of how music is presented is sought. The question as to what music is actually communicating is also a recurring theme in his work and he is often drawn to the relation between emotion and language and how that defines our experience of music.

In 2000 he won the Gaudeamus composition prize for his composition a conSPIracy cantata – which was regarded by The Wire magazine as ‘a modern classic in the making’.