Pinnel at TUSK

I was delighted to experience Pinnel playing at the Sage on Friday night! Newcastle-based multi-disciplinary artist Lindsay Duncanson’s work “concerns people and space and how our relationship to landscape is mediated through culture and history; how we negotiate the sublime, the unimaginable, the beauty and fear of modern life”. 

Lindsay formed the Noizechoir experimental vocal group with partner Marek Gabrysch and they have since performed across the UK and Europe, including at TUSK Festival. 

The Noize Choir is a performance ensemble that was formed in 2011 by Newcastle based artists Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch. It involves a loose collective of noise enthusiasts with a common desire to use the human voice free of the traditional restraints of typical choral settings, language or musical notation. Their work is based on a shared fascination with science, culture and landscape. They indulge in phenomenological explorations of museum collections, or imaginings of our geological past. Replicating and experimenting with the sound of machines or the natural world, Noize Choir continually find ways to push and pull the idea of what a choir can be. Noize Choir have composed and performed in French churches and on Austrian radio, at the Baltic Centre for contemporary arts, The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and the Grade II listed Preston Bus station.

http://www.noizechoir.net/

As an artist, she’s very interested in landscape and location and the human relationship to it. 

As Pinnel, Lindsay creates what she calls “vocal soundscapes” using live looping and her own voice, building compelling rhythms and rounds through little more than breath and punctuated utterances and creating an affect that’s as much machine-like as human.

http://www.productofboy.net/pinnel.htm

Simulacrum by Dawn Felicia Knox

Donned in waterproofs, hiking boots and a head torch, along with a group of other art adventurers, I boarded the minibus destined for Walltown Quarry, where we would witness a commissioned performance by the Noize Choir as part of Simulacrum, the latest work by artist Dawn Felicia Knox.

After a day of torrential rain, it finally stopped just in time for the outing. In what seemed like the middle of nowhere, the sky was clear and dark. The group gathered together to begin our journey to the installation. Hundreds of little firelights created a winding path leading to the structure built of over 8,000 obsolete books. On the way, we stopped to enjoy a couple of performances by Noize Choir who performed "a site-specific sound composition drawing from diverse narratives of the project layered into a rich sound-scape." In the final performance the choir were inside the sculpture, hardly visible apart from the light emitted by the fire lanterns they were holding. Gradually the performers emerged from the structure made from books, and read from some of the texts included in the installation.



Dawn Knox says of the installation, "The structure echoes the precision and geometry of the Roman defensive structures found along Hadrian’s Wall in contrast to the subsuming natural environment. As designed, the sculpture began to decay almost immediately – the rain has permeated the pages, the sun has cracked the covers and insects and spores have begun to colonize the books. This mirrors the act of ruination of the ancient monuments themselves, be it at an accelerated pace. Along with the notions of impermanence and preservation, the work explores the ideas of language, migration and the materialisation of knowledge and experience through the written word."

The journey to and from the artwork really added to the wonder of the piece. The passageway of lights was magical and helped visualise the lead up to the installation.

The fact that this was a one off event in a remote place at night had the effect of making my experience seem all the more memorable.

http://www.hexham-courant.co.uk/features/----Sculpture-books-its-place-in-history-of-Wall----404e372d-8e14-4dd1-8bc7-52f90ab83420-ds

 One felt valued to be 

This project was created in partnership with Hadrian Arts Trust and funded by the Arts Council England and Northumberland National Park.