climate, ecology, and sustainability
For the Climate | Sound | Action series co-produced by Sonorities and Reach’26 Arts and Sustainability Festival, we have programmed works that explore or respond to environmental challenges, align with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or propose new, sustainable approaches to artistic practice.
This concert will feature five pieces:
Joseph Potter – Predecessor
Andrew Lewis – Two Lakes
Viktoria Arvayová and Celestína Minichová – Song for Rye Islands
Eimer Birkbeck – Sounding the Otherworld, Svalbard Archipelago
Mathias Arrignon – Brief elegy to the pale
Programme Notes
Joseph Potter – Predecessor
Predecessor features samples taken from recordings of a conversation between Joseph’s grandfather and mother. Tangling shards of a recording of a holy well in the Burren anda dawn chorus recordings also made in Clare interplay throughout the piece to a climax of static. There is a melodic solo of a bird who is brought in and out of the composition and then is subsumed by the cacophony of the dawn chorus; a reminder of the individual’s role in the universe. We are reminded that there is no separation between humans and nature. The composition flirts with the eternal attempt to describe the eternal.
Andrew Lewis – Two Lakes
Only he, The Giver of Life
Vain wisdom had I,
Did no-one know?
No-one? …
Precious realities make it rain,
From you comes your happiness,
Giver of life! …
Nezahualcóyotl (1402 –1472)
Lake Nezahualcóyotl is a reservoir in Chiapas created as part of a hydroelectric power scheme. The dam was completed in 1966, and the area around the original lake flooded. Just a year earlier a similar flooding drowned the village of Capel Celyn in Wales, controversially displacing its Welsh-speaking residents. At both lakes, droughts cause the periodic re-emergence of the drowned buildings, with increasing regularity: a 16th century church at Lake Nezahualcóyotl and the ruins of the village of Capel Celyn. These appearances re-awaken painful memories of lost worlds and past injustices; but they are also a very present reminder of the crisis of climate change, in Mexico, Wales and across the globe.
Materials in the piece have been shaped using water level and flow data from both lakes, provided by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (EU) and the National River Flow Archive (UK). I am indebted to Dr Iestyn Woolway for his assistance in accessing and understanding the data.
Viktoria Arvayová and Celestína Minichová – Song for Rye Islands
Songs for Rye Island is a composition created by Viktoria Arvayová and Celestína Minichová. It is composed originally for a fountain, which is situated near a problematic landfill in Bratislava. The fountain is close to a site that has been contaminating soil and groundwater since 1966, becomes a symbolic starting point for reflection on water, its circulation, and its fragility. Presented here as a quadraphonic fixed media piece, the work blends a poem about water circulation with field research on local water quality, creating layered sonic textures that evoke the movement of water, its flows, and the tension between contamination and renewal.
The fountain functions as entry point into the subject, inviting audiences to engage with water as a vital, living element of the urban landscape, and to experience listening as a means of awareness, reflection, and collective responsibility.
Eimer Birkbeck – Sounding the Otherworld, Svalbard Archipelago
Sounding the Otherworld -Sound Conferenced performed – the live narrated sound piece is the sonic sum of my primary research project undertaken this year in April 2025, in Longyearbyen, Svalbard, where I began to undertake field work exploring how we perceive climate change in the high arctic, considering human altered landscapes, lateral moraine landforms and changing bioacoustics soundscapes. Through guided and self-led exploration of glacier caves and moraine terrains and the tidal shorelines of Adentfjorden, I extended my exploration to the now closed mining site 7, the altered terrain surrounding it, and the returning Little Auks nesting habitat, situated in the cliffs of Bjørndalen valley.
How do we register the material experiences of life world encounters and the temporal and spatial forms of sonic agency that expand the stories of interconnected beinghoods, withn tipping pint terrains ? With my recording tools I record the poly materiality and temporal alterities of changing ecosystems, throughout weather seasons, working both locally and remotely, and returning cyclically to sites. The act of listening, as a conscious inwardly bodily process guides my work, and I question its multiple forms of embodiment, from the physiological to the sensed, and how it can irreversibly decenter the humanly controlled
Mathias Arrignon – Brief elegy to the pale
Brief elegy to the pale reflects on the allure and loss of Arctic landscapes, using field recordings gathered during an expedition to Svalbard archipelago. Combining these recordings with electroacoustic techniques, the work reflects on the ambivalent feelings of fascination and mourning that arise in the face of disappearing polar landscapes. Through a textural and structured sonic language, it narrates the dynamics of a changing world and invites audiences to experience its affective resonances.
This piece was created as part of the artist’s participation in The Arctic Circle residency program, and commissioned by INA GRM (Paris) and Phonurgia Nova (Arles).
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