Wednesday, 18th November
At 5pm today:
Chris Biddlecombe & David Trouton present ‘a gong chime through Dainava pines’
“Inheriting a collection of objects is very different from curating a collection for ourselves. The criteria for selection may not be fully known – the choices for inclusion, exclusion, similarity or difference may elude. Our perceptions of the relationships between the chosen objects may become distorted or coloured by our own associations, experience and understanding.
When we place one such collection alongside another, relationships can occur that have the possibility of creating a new alternative curated family, or a series of cross-referencing cousins. The placing and pairing of things has its own momentum – an internal logic that is partly calculated and partly accidental.
Some years ago we inherited one half of a diverse percussion stick collection. We started by placing a set of mallets alongside another group of beaters, punctuating each with an unknown stick or head fragment. In this way we could understand how each object might work as a “hitter”, but we had to imagine what sort of resonant object could then be struck. What did these incomplete instruments really sound like?”
‘A gong chime through Dainava pines’ takes us to the beginning of this story and the first of six segments of the collection from different locations.
“Box No. 1” is a functional set of homemade instruments that bears testimony to a besieged composer’s desire to continue creating music alone, amidst a time of terrible upheaval and conflict.
The recreated sounds of these instruments take us from a solitary apartment in a Baltic town to the warm seas of Indonesia.
‘A gong chime through Dainava pines’ is a 25-minute broadcast conversation that takes a leap of imagination, picking apart the fragments of this original collector’s story and poetically restoring the artefacts to a former life through a curated combination of tape archives, contemporary field recordings and environmental simulations.
