apeiron

a radio art work blurring boundaries between radio play and experimental music

commissioned by German public service broadcaster SWR

'The origin of all things is the boundless.'        (Anaximander of Miletus, 610 - 546 BCE,  fragment)

apeiron is composed of elemental Sounds, timbres interlocking to form abstract environments portraying power – relentless power - the primal pulsings of seamless successions with chance occurrences of stirrings, interruptions, mergings, eddies and backwash.  It acknowledges life is movement and subject to constant flux, and portrays sensual unchanging change, irregular regularity, something approaching and something departing, the already here and the almost forming.  It dives deep into the shared essences of all things and lands on lonely outcrops.  There is something about letting go - or going with it...

apeiron’s genesis was in Stromness, the small port in Orkney, Scotland where rhythms depend on shapeshifting tides and weathers, where legends are inscribed deep in dialect, where sea-going vessels throb and creak, and where oceans, winds and lands ripple as at the cosmos’ edge.  Time surrounded by tides is different from land-time.  It’s continually rippling, swelling, surging, a pivotal rhythm of our world.

As a way of entering these thoughts and rhythms for an as-yet unformed soundwork recordings of sea-moods were made, and residents and visitors to Stromness were offered the chance to be recorded reading aloud time-times for the town. Twenty-two volunteer voices came forward and all play a part in apeiron.  In the radio studio in Baden-Baden, Germany, Berlin-based experimental vocal artist Audrey Chen breathed life into other-worldly elements.  SWR studio engineers Daniel and Robin navigated the technical challenges.  All co-create with the Listener’s imagination the shaping of a universe purely through Sound.

 
Composition, direction and field recordings:  Leona Jones
Vocal soloist:  Audrey Chen
Volunteer voices :  Thorfinn, Sylvia, Sydney, Rebecca, Rachel, Pamela, Nick, Nathan, Keely, Jenny, Gunilla, Fraser, Fiona, Fiona, Ella, Darrell, Ciska, Chris, Catherine, Cary, Antony, Alison
Production:  SWR and Frank Halbig   
Sound and technology:  Daniel Senger and Robin Zwirner

Stromness Tide Times 2017 by kind permission of UKHO and Dick Dolby