I spent this morning in the recording studio with David, editing the draft version of the sound piece. It was wonderful to hear the different layers of sound that David had built into the work, and the creative ways in which he was using the recordings we had made on site.
The photograph of David’s computer screen below gives a visual score for the layering of sound in the piece. The top layers represent the three voices in the project – mine and the two participants – ; the layers beneath represent the resonances of the Angel, which run throughout the piece, and the sounds of the traffic and the wind; and the lower levels are the sounds of birdsong, leaves in the trees, and grass whispering in the wind.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The addition of the field recordings to the recorded voices gives the words of the participants additional resonance, as David marked the moments in the conversations when they had made reference to weather or particular sounds, and enhanced them through recorded sound. The work is divided into four sections, corresponding to the seasons, and David used the contact microphone recording of the interior of The Angel for the relevant season. Listening to them in sequence, it was remarkable how much the vibrations from The Angel differed in tone across the year, with the winter recordings shaped by the violent wind and rain of the storms, and the summer recordings more vibrant and lively, capturing the muffled sounds of children playing and visitors chatting nearby.
The sound piece also captures a few memorable moments of the field recordings. From our summer visit to The Angel, David built in the song of the blackbird that I recorded singing from the top of a tree in the copse, as well as my recording of my own footsteps. The geophone captured the boom of The Angel contracting, and David used the sound to punctuate the sections of the work, like the regular tolling of a bell. David’s visit to The Angel to record during Storm Babet produced the echoing of the raindrops from the surface of the sculpture that can be heard in the Winter section of the piece.
The continual drone of The Angel (shown in pink above) reminded me of David’s recordings of the pithead at Easington Colliery, in its haunting evocation of the former mining communities. In our sound piece, it accompanies (and expands) the participants’ associations of The Angel sculpture with the mineworkers who had toiled beneath.
The sound piece will be installed in The Arches on the main campus at Newcastle University on Monday 1 July and will play from 1-7 July.
This post forms part of a monthly series that documents the plants growing at The Angel of the North through a series of cyanotypes.
The month of June has brought into flower the different grasses that grow in the field on which The Angel of the North stands. Attending to these plants requires a different scale of vision from looking at The Angel, as well as adjusting the gaze downward. Cyanotypes of the grasses bring out the sculptural beauty of their forms, which are easily overlooked.
Image Credit: Anne Whitehead
I wrote in my post on the month of May about the significance for the memorial site of dwelling with the ordinariness of things, and this month’s homage to the grasses that grow there continues in this vein. These plants are not exceptional or extraordinary, but looking at them closely reveals their distinctive beauty. I have often used the term grassroots memorial to describe the memorial in the trees at The Angel. This phrase, which registers that the memorial site is rooted in the spontaneous, collective activities of ordinary people, has its origin in the roots of grasses as a fundamental layer from which growth takes place.
Image Credit: Anne Whitehead
The Sounding the Angel project documents the memorial site through sound. I have written in this blog of the rustling of the leaves in the trees as one of the defining sounds of the memorial site in the summer months. Although less audible, the whispering of the grasses can also be heard alongside them, as they variously bend or shake in the wind.
The images of the grasses above have all been made using the dry cyanotype method, which involves placing the plant onto paper when the chemicals that develop the image have dried. The grace and elegance of these cyanotypes prompted me also to develop images of the grasses using the wet cyanotype method, which I have described in a previous post.
This technique enables a greater range of effects, even if it is less predictable in outcome.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
This image captures the feel of the grasses swaying in the wind, and turmeric sprinkled onto the wet paper enhances its sense of life and movement.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
Here, the textured background has been created by placing a layer of cling film onto the glass during the exposure of the image.
Image credit: Anne Whitehead
Here’s another variation, which combines the two techniques. The pooling of vinegar spray on the cling film has caused a rich variety of blues to emerge.
The cyanotype methods differ in their effects, but they both capture the structural beauty of the grasses. These plants define the site of The Angel in June, and this post both captures and celebrates the range of different species that grow there.
Last night, David and I met for a recording session at The Angel of the North. It was a beautiful evening and there were a lot of visitors on the site. We are making field recordings across the seasons of the year, and this was our recording for the sounds of Spring. For each season, we have recorded the sounds of nature on the site – from the autumn dawn chorus, through the high winds of winter’s Storm Babet, to the springtime ambience of early evening. We have also recorded the interior resonances of The Angel at the different times and seasons, taking ‘readings’ from the north, east, south, and west faces of the sculpture.
We usually use the contact microphone to record the resonances of The Angel, but David brought to this recording session a new recording device – the geophone.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Usually used to pick up underground vibrations, David placed the geophone at the four points around The Angel, which, as usual, varied in their pitch and tone. The geophone had a magnet embedded within it so it attached more securely to The Angel than the contact microphone. David used both recording devices, and it was possible to switch from one to the other through the headphones, attending to the differences between them. The photograph at the top of this post shows me listening to the geophone on the north side of The Angel (the front of the sculpture). The sound was more airy and ethereal than in the other recordings we have done. There was little wind and heavy traffic so the resonances would have been formed by sound travelling through the ground from the motorway, rather than wind echoing down from the wings.
Photo Credit: Anne Whitehead
As we stood behind The Angel recording the resonances from its south side, the structure contracted, producing the booming noise that I had heard on a previous visit. As before, the sound resonated through my body and it travelled up through The Angel and along its wings. Even though both the contact microphone and the geophone were recording at the time, David felt that the unexpected volume was most likely to be picked up as distortion by them, although it may have been captured by the field microphone that was recording beneath the west wing of The Angel.
The trees on The Angel’s west side, including the memorial site, were filled with birdsong and we set up a field microphone facing in the direction of the trees to capture these sounds. Before I arrived, David had recorded the rustle of the leaves that are now on the trees, and I walked down to the memorial with the field microphone to try to record the blackbird that was singing from their highest branches.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
As we recorded, the sun gradually lowered in the sky and the shadows lengthened across the field. I took the photograph above to document the long shadow cast by The Angel, and it speaks more broadly to the project. I have described the memorial in the trees as standing in the shadow of The Angel, and this photograph gives a sense of the sculpture reaching out across the site, its wings embracing everything that lies in their radius.
There are a few sounds that are particularly evocative for me of the memorial site at The Angel of the North: the rustling of the alder leaves overhead in the summer months, the steady background hum of traffic on the nearby A1 motorway, and the tinkling of wind chimes when they are caught by a gust of wind.
Over the several years that I have been visiting the memorial, I have photographed a number of different wind chimes that have been suspended from the branches of the trees. Some, as in the photograph above, have been comprised of several bells, while others are made up of a single bell. The placing of wind chimes at the memorial is unsurprising, given their traditional association with good luck and the summoning of benevolent spirits, as well as their conventional placing at the site of a shrine.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
When I visited The Angel last Friday, it was late afternoon and there was a high wind carrying occasional spatters of rain. There were only a few visitors and they did not venture down to the memorial site, which does not yet have its sheltering canopy of leaves. The strong winds had brought down even more branches since my last visit and the site felt raw and exposed with the late winter gale and darkening skies.
As I emerged from the memorial site up the little banked path that leads to The Angel, I caught the intermittent notes of a wind chime as it trembled in the wind. I headed along to one of the trees that edge the path leading west from The Angel to listen more closely to its strange music. As David wasn’t with me, I captured the sound by holding my mobile phone close to the chimes and pressing record.
Audio credit: Anne Whitehead
When I listened back to the recording, I could hear the tinny tinkling of the chimes, the gusts of wind, and the ever-present background noise of the traffic.
David’s recordings of The Angel with his contact microphones enable us to hear both the wind and the traffic resonating through its hollow structure. I have written in a previous post about the ways in which listening to these vibrations through his headphones shifts our perception of the sculpture, so that it is transformed momentarily into a vast musical instrument. If The Angel resonates with the wind that buffets its wings and vibrates down through its body, then the wind chimes in the trees form a high percussive complement to its deep notes.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Attending to the various sounds of the memorial site enables us to register the invisible but powerful presence at The Angel of the wind. Its destructive effects can currently be seen in the fallen branches and scattered tributes. But the wind can also be heard as it sets into motion the chimes that hang from the trees. With the help of David’s microphones, we can also capture the wind’s eerie booming and droning within the interior space of The Angel itself, as it forms a mighty echo chamber. The influence of the trees on the memorial site is evident, because it is visible. But if we attend to the auditory aspects of the site, we can encounter the vital agency of the wind, in its creative as well as its destructive aspects.
When I first spoke to David about the Sounding the Angel project, he told me about a recording he had recently made at Easington Colliery in County Durham. He had been recording the wildlife in the ponds with underwater microphones, and had walked up to the reconstructed pit cage nearby, which marks where the miners would have descended into the mine for their underground shift. Using his contact microphones, David tested to see what noise this large metal structure might make. The sound that he heard through his headphones is similar to the vibrations that reverberate through the hollow form of The Angel, and David integrated them into the larger sound piece that he was making. You can hear ‘There Is Power In These Titans Yet’, David’s recording of the pit cage memorial, here.
Listening to David’s piece through headphones, the deep rumblings, surgings and flexings caused by the structure’s amplification of the wind are similar to the sounds that the contact microphones pick up at The Angel. David’s evocative title invites us to read the piece as a sonic statement of the energies and potential that still reside in former mining areas. As with his recordings of the aquatic life in ponds, David’s sounding of the pit cage shows us that community extends beyond the human, and his work gives us insights into a larger ecology that mostly goes unwitnessed. The recordings make visible that which lies below the surface, whether that is the unseen wildlife under the water, or sounds that travel through the earth. Each of these elements of David’s work resonate with the Sounding the Angel project, given the siting of Antony Gormley’s sculpture on the former pithead baths of Ravensworth Ann Colliery, also known as the Ann Pit.
Last weekend, I visited Easington Colliery to gain a better sense of the inter-relationship between the reconstructed pit cage and The Angel. To what extent can one be transposed onto another, and what distinguishes them apart? Approaching the pit cage from a pathway that leads from the road, way markers give visitors key facts about the history of the mine. Although the pit cage now stands in isolation, an extensive mine works had once surrounded it. The sculpture is only fully visible after climbing to the crest of the hill, framing a view of the sea beyond. From beneath the pit cage, I looked out over extensive views north to the Sunderland coastline, and south to Teesside. Although there were some other visitors, the sculpture did not have the same constant flow of people as The Angel.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
The most significant difference from The Angel became apparent when I followed a muddy track past a children’s playground to the Easington Colliery Disaster Memorial. Here, a horizontal pithead wheel is enclosed in a circular wooden cage, and the spaces between the spokes of the wheel have been filled with coal. The memorial commemorates a significant mining accident that took place on 29 May 1951, when an explosion in the mine resulted in the deaths of 83 men, two of whom were rescue workers. The death toll was so high because the explosion occurred at the change of shift, which renders the pit cage memorial even more poignant. The ornamental metalwork that surrounds the Disaster Memorial inscribes the year of the explosion and the total number of men that were lost.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
I have previously differentiated the grassroots memorial in the trees from roadside memorials, noting that the memorial at The Angel does not mark the site of a death. Comparison with the memorials at Easington Colliery offers a sharpened perspective on this statement. Paired with the Disaster Memorial nearby, the pit cage at Easington marks the site where the explosion occurred in 1951; the sculpture commemorates the 83 lives that were lost there. The form of the pit cage is also specific to the event of the explosion, commemorating the change of shift that had entangled so many men at a single site.
If I turn to the entry for the Ravensworth Ann Colliery on the website of the Durham Mining Museum, the single listing under ‘Disasters (5 or more killed)’ is an explosion that took 16 lives on 10th June 1757. This accident, although claiming over the 10 lives that qualify an event as a mining disaster, is on a smaller scale than at Easington and it is far outside of living memory. Under ‘Names of those killed at this colliery’, 80 men are listed, including the 16 men who died in the explosion. The remaining 64 men died as a result of individual accidents, most often killed by a fall of stone or being struck by a truck. These deaths have different causes and, while they lend weight and specificity to Antony Gormley’s intention to commemorate on the site those who died as a result of the mining industry, The Angel is not specific either to these men or to the Ravensworth Ann colliery. The form of The Angel does not explicitly reference the mine, and the sculpture’s title gestures to the broader demise of heavy industry across the region.
Reading the pit cage at Easington Colliery in relation to The Angel calls attention to the importance of history in understanding the resonance of the site as a memorial space. The pit cage memorial at Easington marks the site where the explosion occurred in 1951, and it commemorates the 83 lives that were lost. The Angel stands on a site that still carries the emotional weight of the 80 deaths listed by the Mining Museum as having occurred over the timeframe that the colliery was in operation. Nevertheless, Gormley’s sculpture does not commemorate either a single event or particular lives. The lack of specificity of The Angel lends itself to adoption as a grassroots memorial in a way that the Easington pit cage memorial does not – the sculpture marks the site out as a place of memorial significance, but it evokes a range of associations, meaning that visitors can more readily connect it to their own particular lives and losses.
References
‘Ravensworth Ann Colliery’, Durham Mining Museum, https://www.dmm.org/colliery/-003.htm
I met Catherine Murray at The Angel on a wet and muddy November morning to record a segment for Radio 4’s Sunday programme. We walked from the base of The Angel down the hill to the memorial, and through the trees. As we stood at the feet of The Angel, sun broke through the clouds and visitors posed for photographs on the slope below us, arms outstretched.
Walking with Catherine, I was aware once again of the importance of sound on the site. The traffic noise was constant, and I registered how much it encapsulates the atmosphere of this place, representing more than ambient noise. I noted in my last post that the movement of the traffic counterpoints and calls attention to the stillness of The Angel standing in its midst. Due to the surrounding roads, this contrast of movement and stillness is present if you are approaching The Angel from the carpark, standing beneath its wings, or walking through the memorial site in the trees. Catherine recorded her feet plodging through the mud beneath the trees to capture the acoustic resonance of our walk, a record of our movement which struck me as a further point of contrast with the recordings that David and I have been making of the static form of The Angel.
I was delighted to hear the recording aired on today’s New Year’s Eve programme. It was paired with author Peter Stanford speaking about what angels mean today and observing that, even as organised religion is in decline, angels offer a framework through which we can imagine continuing our conversation with the dead. Angels, like Gormley’s sculpture, offer a contact with spirituality without the need for affiliation to a specific faith or religion.
The Angel of the North appears in the dictionary of angels in Stanford’s Angels: A History, listed under ‘G’ for ‘Gormley’. Stanford highlights the importance of angels ‘in troubling, even hopeless, times’ (p. 74). Gormley has likewise indicated that his angel figure was intended as a guardian for the north-east of England at a time of ‘painful transition’, as traditional heavy industries gave way to the information age. On his website, Gormley speaks of The Angel as a ‘focus of hope’, and as a memorial that ‘bears witness to the hundreds and thousands of colliery workers who had spent the last three hundred years mining coal beneath the surface’. Although the specific historical resonance of the site may not be as present for visitors now as when the work was first installed, the sculpture still represents a place of hope, to which people turn at times of grief and personal crisis.
Many thanks to Catherine for editing our conversation so beautifully for the programme. Our conversation begins at 18:11, at this link.
If you walk into Leeds City Art Gallery, a life-size brick sculpture of a man stands directly in front of you. This is the maquette for The Brick Man, a monumental sculpture by Antony Gormley that was never realised but that is now widely seen as an important precursor for The Angel of the North. Gormley proposed the sculpture in 1988 for the Holbeck area of Leeds, where it would have stood over 30 metres high on land surrounded by railway lines, and greeted travellers arriving at Leeds station. (The Angel now stands 20 metres high, surrounded by roads and welcoming drivers into Gateshead.) The brick construction of the proposed sculpture referenced the brickworks that had formerly occupied the Holbeck site, which was derelict wasteland by 1988. The Brick Man would thereby have materialised the industrial heritage of the area of Leeds for which it was designed, a full decade before The Angel commemorated the colliery that occupied the Gateshead site on which it now stands.
If you walk round the maquette of The Brick Man to look at the back, a small doorway is visible in one of its heels. Here, visitors would have entered to gaze up at the hollow interior of the sculpture and take in its height and scale. Once inside the structure, visitors would have had the opportunity to climb a staircase, which led up to windows in the man’s ears; from here, visitors could take in the view of the city that the high vantage point afforded. Gormley abandoned this access to the sculpture’s interior for his design of The Angel a decade later; it is nevertheless a helpful reminder of how important the hollow interior of his sculptures was for Gormley at this time.
Gormley’s extensive study of Buddhism and meditation had given him a long-standing interest in the human body as it is experienced from the inside. His sculptural figures are typically moulds of the human form, which often use his own body as the model. The sculptures as moulds or ‘body cases’ have an empty space within, which Gormley has linked to the meditation that he practices while the mould is being made. He describes the experience of being encased in plaster in this way:
In the moulding process I have to be very still and to be breathing regularly. I have to try not to think about the outside and to be completely concentrated on the space that exists behind appearance. At first this experience is very claustrophobic. . . . As the plaster goes on and I am enclosed ever more deeply in a damp, dark, soft enclosure, there is a descent into the darkness of the body. This is the space that we all spend our lives escaping from, but it is also the place of imagination: a place that starts with feelings of claustrophobia but opens into an extension as wide as a sky at night. (‘Feeling into Form’, p. 1518)
Gormley’s sculptures arise out of meditation and invite their viewers to use the work as a means for their own reflection. In The Brick Man, the proposed encounter with the interior ‘darkness of the body’ was literal, with the visitor entering the sculpture’s internal space. Although The Angel can only be viewed externally, it works on the same principles as Gormley’s other work of this period, its stance and hollow interior asking the viewer to participate in the meditative state that is, for the artist, the origin of all his work.
The location of the sculpture also contributes to the meditative feeling that Gormley seeks to evoke. The Brick Man and The Angel were both designed to represent still centres in environments where people routinely rush past, whether by rail or by car. Gormley has written of the placing of his works:
I guess we then have to ask how these works fit into the world and how they can evoke or identify a feeling in space, how in a time of extreme visual cacophony in the built environment do we use the space of sculpture to reinforce the self in this confused and commercialized world? As we walk down the street, our attention is constantly bombarded with bright new goods in the shop windows, a man trying to evangelize with a microphone in the centre of the street, brief glimpses of the weather, a cloudless sky, an impending storm, large advertisements, the ringing and talking in mobile phones. In this distracting and distracted world, so lacking in cohesion, how do we insert sculpture as both a point of symbolized self in the world and a place for self in the world, a place that is silent, still, removed? (‘Feeling into Form’, pp. 1513-14)
Gormley thinks of sculpture as something that is not only itself still and unmoving, but that can be deliberately placed in a hectic urban environment to create a space of stillness and reflection for its visitors. Although his example is a high street, it readily transfers to the busy roads that surround The Angel. Those who are driving past on the A1 can pause their journey to find a place that feels ‘still’ and ‘removed’. It is instructive, too, to think about the language that Gormley uses here – even as he thinks about the visual, he turns to the auditory to make his point, speaking about ‘cacophony’, the man with the microphone, and the constant background chatter of the mobile phone. The feeling that sculpture evokes not only stills movement; it also quietens noise.
When I was standing at the feet of The Angel this morning, there was a loud thump above me, followed by a reverberation down the body of The Angel that passed through the ground to me, rising through my feet and up my body. My first thought was that a bird had flown into one of The Angel’s wings and that the sound was caused by the impact, but I could see no sign of any collision. I concluded that the warm sun heating the metal after the recent freezing temperatures had caused it to expand, producing the booming noise that I both heard and felt. This encounter with The Angel’s sound acted as a forceful reminder of its hollow interior, which shaped the deep reverberation that resonated through my own body.
The incident caused me to reflect on what it means to sound The Angel in our project. It reminded me to be wary of any claim that David and I are uniquely able to reveal The Angel’s sound through technology, when a combination of atmospheric conditions and sculptural form had produced such a deeply resonant noise. It also cautioned me against using language such as ‘the voice’ of The Angel, because we are neither making The Angel speak, nor adding its noise to the nearby cacophony of traffic. What we are capturing instead is the echo of The Angel’s surroundings as they reverberate through its hollow structure – whether that is the sound of the traffic, of wind, or of rain. This takes us closer to Gormley’s own interest in the interior of his sculptures as a space of encounter and imagination. I am reminded of the visitors who recently listened through David’s headphones to The Angel’s resonances and observed that the noise sounded like something you could either meditate to, or compose with. The sounds that David is recording retain the sense of stillness that Gormley associates with sculptural form, giving us an entry point into imagining the interior of The Angel, the hollow space that was so central to Gormley’s artwork of this period. Instead of walking into the structure and peering up into its shadowy interior, sound can evoke its elusive inner form for us through echo and vibration.
In the placing of The Brick Man and The Angel, the historical resonance of the site was key, informing both the form and the material of the sculpture. Situated on abandoned post-industrial wasteland, sculpture aimed to reclaim it as a place – an artistic practice that was tied to policies of urban regeneration, but also extended beyond this to create a site of pause and reflection. Speaking about the relation between art and spirituality at Durham Cathedral in 1996, Gormley reflected on the spiritual role of sculpture in a secular society, observing:
I am interested in reviving [the] idea of presence. Can we have presence without the God? Can we resurrect the monument without bringing the shadow of bad history? The idea of an image that is open enough to be interpreted widely, that has multiple and generative potential for meaning but is strong enough to be a focus. How can we construct such an image? In being someone’s can it be everyone’s? (‘Art and Spirituality’, p. 156)
The Angel manifests as one potential solution to Gormley’s questions: a symbol that is open to interpretation, and a powerful focal point; an image that references religion, but holds a broad spiritual resonance. The grassroots memorial that has emerged at the site suggests that The Angel has taken on the kind of ‘presence’ that Gormley was interested in, becoming a place of spiritual significance in a predominantly secular time.
Gormley’s statement about the Angel that has been placed on site refers to the mound on which the sculpture stands as a significant factor in its effect. He says: ‘The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound’. In addition to the historical resonance of the mine beneath, the positioning of the sculpture on the raised ground evokes a sense of neolithic monuments. Driving past The Angel and viewing it from the A1 has something of the effect of seeing Stonehenge rising in the distance across Salisbury Plain. The approach to The Angel on foot entails walking up the mound towards it, and then standing beneath its towering form. Visitors often reach out to touch The Angel as they would the stone of a megalith. I have written in previous posts about the trees of the memorial feeling like an ancient grove, and the tying of ribbons to the trees resembling Celtic traditions and beliefs. There is, then, a discernible continuity between the ancient spiritual resonances that Gormley evoked in his design of The Angel and the grassroots memorial practices that have more recently emerged at the site.
References
Antony Gormley, ‘Art and Spirituality’, Address at a conference in Durham Cathedral, October 1996. Reproduced in John Hutchinson, E. H. Gombrich, Lela B. Njatin and W. J. T. Mitchell, Antony Gormley (London and New York: Phaidon, 2000), pp. 154-56.
Antony Gormley, ‘Feeling into form’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 362.2132 (2007), pp. 1513-18.
In a recent visit to Middlesbrough’s Institute of Modern Art, I encountered sound artist Nell Catchpole’s ‘Teesmouth’, a video installation included in the exhibition People Powered: Stories of the River Tees. The original sound piece was commissioned by BBC Radio 3, and it responds to the ecological crisis currently affecting the marine waters around Teesside. The mass die-off of species, including crab and lobster, has been attributed to various causes, including the effects of an algae and the deep dredging of the river Tees.
The landscape that Catchpole explores is the Tees estuary, a place of shifting tides and mudflats that is an important feeding ground for wading birds as well as for the resident colony of harbour seals. The constant ebb and flow of the sea, as well as the site’s proximity to the heavy shipping of an industrial port, makes Teesmouth, in Catchpole’s description, a place of ‘constant change and flux and exchange’.
Catchpole’s work begins with the sound of the tide washing on the shore, and her reflections on what it means to listen. Listening ‘intimately’, she observes, gives her a sense of ‘connection and solidarity’ with the place. Structured as a walk, the piece brings Catchpole’s own soundmaking and reflections into conversation with others she meets on the way, interlocutors who have a long intimacy with this landscape, and who have witnessed recent changes there. Field recording is described as a way of listening differently, of ‘breaking the habits of filtered listening’ that attend our everyday lives, and of being more ‘expansive’. For Catchpole, this brings into focus a sense of ‘entanglement’ with our surroundings, a feeling of ‘being with’. To enhance this sense of intimacy with the estuary that she documents, Catchpole engages in a playful practice of making sounds with what she finds there – sticks, stones, shells, sand, and grasses. This fosters a process of imaginative engagement, that helps to disrupt her habitual patterns of listening.
Like David, Catchpole uses hydrophones – underwater microphones – to capture the hidden sounds of the tiny creatures that live beneath the mud, revealing the mudflats themselves to be vibrant and noisy environments. These ‘quiet species’ are important to listen to, because they form a vital presence in this landscape, their sounds the noise of creatures that work to repair the damage that has been caused by the toxic waste from former industries. David uses the same microphones in his work to record the species that live in ponds and harbours, and the noisier the recording, the healthier the water is. For our project, contact microphones will capture the resonances of The Angel, and the same principle is at work. In the words of Catchpole, ‘It is important to listen to the quiet, often ignored, hidden sounds of a place.’
The sound of the water is replaced by noises made by Catchpole with sticks, sand and shells, and, like her, we attune ourselves to listening differently. We also hear the noises of the tiny creatures working slowly and minutely in the mud, which counterpoint the human voices that speak of more visible change. Conversations with local residents open up different perspectives on the estuary. A fisherman reports on the death of crabs since the previous September. A walker mimics the singing of the seals which can be heard there on a calm day, but not on that day because it was too windy. A birdwatcher lists the migrants that can be seen out on the mudflats – wheatears, waxwings – and speaks of seeing the thousands of dead crabs that had washed ashore at Teesmouth, reminding us of the intimate entanglement of species. A chorus of human voices are recorded from a protest march, chanting the refrain, ‘Save Our Seas’. The piece closes by returning to the natural sounds of the estuary: the call of a wading bird flying overhead, the wind in the grasses.
Catchpole’s practice of sound making with the materials that are at hand reminds me of David knocking on the panels of The Angel on our first visit. David is also keen to record The Angel in heavy rain, testing with his microphones how the sound of the rainfall would resonate through the sculpture. I am intrigued to find out how these possibilities for producing sound at the site change our imaginative engagement with it. Catchpole’s mingling of human voices with sounds from her field recordings chimes with our hope to combine recordings from our conversations about the memorial with field recordings from, and of, The Angel.
My second visit to The Angel with David took place on a very windy day. As I arrived, David emerged from the memorial in the trees, having made a short recording of the wind in the leaves. I entered the trees and took a few minutes to listen to the dry rustle as their branches waved above me, a sound that I strongly associate with this place. String had been threaded between two alder trees and packages filled with inscribed hearts were pegged to it, which spun and twisted in the air as the wind caught them.
Once we reached The Angel, David took out his new contact microphone, which he was able to clamp onto the ribs of the sculpture, rather than holding it in place as he did on our previous visit. This meant that there was less disturbance to the sound, as interference is caused by slight movements of the hand and the resulting changes in pressure of the microphone on the surface.
We tested the microphone on the west side of The Angel, having climbed the mound after leaving the shelter of the trees. The sound through the headphones was the same low pitch as on the previous recordings, but higher and clearer in tone. As gusts of wind buffeted the wings of The Angel, they resonated down into the sculpture and were clearly audible. David also set up a standing microphone to record the atmospheric conditions on site, so that these sounds could be in conversation with the recordings of the Angel’s interior vibrations.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
David wanted to record at the same points on the Angel in different conditions, so we devised a rudimentary map of the sculpture. Walking round The Angel, I counted twenty ribs and we divided these into four groups of five. We mapped these onto the points of the compass, so that we were recording the west, north, east, and south faces of the sculpture.
Counting five ribs round, David clamped the microphone to the back of The Angel, as high as he could reach. The recording here was different in tone, having an eerie quality like the soundtrack of a horror film. The wind’s gusts were still audible, but less dominant than on The Angel’s western side.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
Five more ribs counted, and we listened to the sound on The Angel’s east face, again placing the microphone as high on the sculpture as we could reach. As on the western side, the wind once more became the prominent feature. David recorded for five minutes in each location, and he explained that, once these files were placed in sequence, the distinctions between them would become more evident.
The final five ribs took us round to the south of the Angel and David fixed the microphone to the front of its feet. Here, the sound was softer and quieter, and the wind was muted. It felt as though The Angel was sheltering the sound, and us, from the force of the wind.
Photo credit: Anne Whitehead
David had recorded at the site once more between our first and second visits, rising on a misty dawn to capture the site without the constant rumble of traffic. Even at this time on a Sunday morning, the flow of cars had been unceasing, however, and David had noted that his recordings of the Angel picked up the vibrations of passing vehicles. On this visit, we were unable to hear the resonances of the traffic, and it seemed that the vibrations to the structure caused by the buffeting of the wind were more audible, with the traffic noise receding to a supporting note.
As on our last visit to The Angel, there were several visitors to the site when we were recording. It was notable that this time they did not approach us to ask what we were doing. I wondered whether this was because of the shift in the recording equipment that we were using. On our first visit, David had held the microphone to the body of the Angel and looked like a doctor with a stethoscope. The new method of clamping the microphone to the sculpture involved less direct contact with The Angel, and David looked more like a structural engineer visiting the site to make tests. Even though we were involved in the same activity, it seemed that a minor change in the recording technique – namely, how David attached the contact microphone to The Angel – had changed the appearance of what we were doing, to make it look more technical and more scientific.
My first visit to The Angel of the North with David took place on a sunny day when the site was busy with families and coach trips. David had brought his audio equipment to test out possibilities for the sound piece and he carried a small recorder, a microphone, and headphones.
Once we reached The Angel, David knocked on each of the welded panels that make up the feet. As we moved round the sculpture, knocking and listening, each panel sounded with a different pitch. We spent some time comparing one panel to another, learning how the sounds varied depending on whether we were at the side of The Angel or were knocking on the heels or toes of the sculpture.
David then put his headphones on and placed the microphone on one of the panels. As he listened to the sounds the microphone picked up, he looked like a doctor with a stethoscope, attending to the internal sounds of the body. He explained that his audio equipment worked in the same way as a stethoscope: the microphone acted as the disc-shaped resonator that is held against the skin and the headphones formed its earpieces.
David invited me to put the headphones on as he held the microphone in place. Putting the headphones over my ears, I heard a low droning hum and was astonished to be able to listen to the ‘voice’ of The Angel as I stood beneath its immense wings. Working slowly round The Angel with the microphone, we heard the same variation in the pitch of the hum that we had picked up with the knocking.
A stethoscope can be used to pick up the sounds made by the heart or the lungs. What noise was David’s microphone enabling us to hear? We could identify vibrations caused by children nearby, who were using The Angel’s toes as a slide. But we weren’t sure if the low drone was the effect of the wind causing The Angel to vibrate or the steady rumble of the motorway traffic as it resonated through the structure. Whatever its source, the sound of The Angel was filled with energy, and it felt like I was listening to the sculpture breathing beside me.
As David made his test recordings, people approached to speak to us, curious about what we were doing. A woman with her children asked what we could hear. David gave the headphones to her daughter, who said that the sound was relaxing, like something you could meditate to. Her son then told us that he would use the sound to compose a piece of music, which he would call ‘The Angel of the North’.
I have always been aware of sound on my visits to The Angel, and in a previous post I described my association of the memorial in the trees with the mingled noise of wind chimes and traffic. Looking back at The Angel from the memorial site, I could hear its lingering hum in my ears, and I knew that, whenever I was there, I would always now listen for that faint echo of The Angel’s breath.
