Creating music to only be listened to in a set place is a strange concept to say the least but artist Alan Dunn has done it again.  Building on his Soundtrack for a Mersey Tunnel, he and artist Jeff Young have compiled a collection of Music for a Williamson Tunnel. This was their submission to the EdgeCentrics exhibition. Alan was inspired to compile this after his first trip where there was the ever present sound of dripping water – that said you can listen to it at other times to.

There are some great tracks (I want one as a ring tone on my mobile) so catch the tracks that have been released so far on this website and listen out for the others.  

I interviewed Alan at the launch of the Edgecentrics exhibition.

More details about the CD are below including tracks details. 

Music For The Williamson Tunnels: A Collection Of The Sound Of Dripping Water 

As Brian Eno made music for environments rather than from them (Music For Airports) these CDs are best listened to within the strange damp world of the Williamson Tunnels in Liverpool. The ceilings of these caverns are thin and the sound of dripping water can frequently be heard, but not necessarily seen. It is a sound that has intrigued artists for nigh on a century and this collection brings together historical pieces alongside new compositions from artists who have expanded that first single drip.

Meandering 

Joseph Williamson arrived in Liverpool in 1780 to look for work. He found employment with the tobacco and snuff firm Richard Tate, marrying into the Tate family in 1802 and indeed buying the company the year later. Living in Mason Street, it is thought that he first started working with a group of men behind his house to counter the 20ft drop down to the next street by extending his garden with arches.

Then, perhaps philanthropically, he had his men continue tunnelling to combat poverty in the area, claiming he was ‘employing more than anyone else’ as men returned from the Napoleonic Wars. Alternatively, his subscription to an extreme religious sect that believed in impending Armageddon suggests that Williamson may have been digging complex bunkers from which to start a new city.

There exists a map of these Tunnels outlining where some of them are, where some start and where some may lie undiscovered. Uncertainty is, and always has been, the appeal. 

Preambling

In the 1944 film Purple Heart a captured airman wrings a wet cloth into a bucket while mopping the brow of his colleague in a subtle suggestion that he has been the victim of Chinese Water Torture. As the dripping sound continues, the scene fades to the same man as a boy. He is now on a ranch, taking a rag from a bucket of water to cool down his new-born foal as his mom and pop look proudly on. The scene then slowly fades back to prison despair.

In 1967 the artist Annea Lockwood reads in John Michel’s book about the custom of inviting people deemed ‘off-balance’ to sit listening to rivers for days on end to become ‘rebalanced’. This sparks her global recordings that over the years becomes The River Archive.

THE COLLECTION: CD1 

1. Weirdomusic - Drip, Drip, Drip

Based in Heerlen in the Netherlands, artist Marco Kalnenek has contributed this track originally recorded in 2004 for the water, wind and sails compilation under the nom-de-plume Weirdomusic.

2. Hugh Le Caine -  Dripsody: An Étude For Variable Speed Recorder (mono, 1955)

A prolific inventor of sound-emitting devices, Canadian artist and technician Le Caine (1914-1977) composed his Dripsodies in one night using only the sound of a single drop of water falling into a bucket, re-recorded at different speeds.

3. Oliver Bernard - Il pleut (Guillaume Apollinaire, 1916)

As original translator of Apollinaire's Calligrammes, Oliver kindly recorded this new reading of Il pleut (It's raining) for the Collection.

4. Splinters - Carwarsh

Ben Torrence, based in Seattle and operating as Splinters, has contributed this beautifully precise track from his CD The Watchmaker (Woodson Lateral Records, 2006).

5. Walter Cianciusi - Heat Transfer Event  (Ken Friedman, 1970)

The Italian fluxus composer has contributed his version of this Fluxus score by Ken Friedman: Glasses: one filled with ice water, one with boiling tea, one or more empty glasses. Liquids are transferred from glass to glass, until the tea is cooled to drinking temperature.

6. Jeff Young  and Alan Dunn - Chapter I (absinthe)

7. Roger McKinley - Insomnia (edit)

Created as a 29-minute piece for broadcast during Isea 98, this edit was composed using amateur actors and found sounds. Aside from the street recordings, Two-Step, Gotham City sample and spoken word, all sounds were constructed from the single ‘drip’ sample. McKinley is author of the award-winning Jackson Pollock the musical published by Michael Butterworth in 2007.

8. Jem Finer - Water And Birds #1

A founding member of The Pogues, it is Jem's more recent works that resonate here, specifically Score for a hole in the ground (2006). Located in a Kent forest, it is a simple structure, inspired by the suikinkutsu water chimes of Kyoto, that amplifies water dripping down a well. It is also conceptually a trilogy of approaches to the sound of dripping water - as natural environmental sound, as rhythm and as ritualistic performance prop. Water and Birds #1 comes from 2005.

9. Scanner - Drips

Drips is a new composition exclusively for this Collection.

10. Hugh Le Caine -  Dripsody: An Étude For Variable Speed Recorder (stereo version, 1957)

11. Vincent Ramos and Diego J. Garza - BAR SCORE

In September 2007, PawnShop Gallery in Los Angeles staged a series of events curated by Natilee Harren entitled DRIP EVENT (for George Brecht). The evening gathered together ‘performers offering his or her unique interpretation as part of a collective exploration of the infinite potential of the score’, including Vincent and Diego’s score: Please pour beer, into cup, under microphone. We are recording. Thank you.

12. Jeff Young  and Alan Dunn - Chapter II (baptism)

13. Etsuko Maesaki - Water Bell

From Etsuko’s Water Bell installation (2006) in which the frequency of dripping water was controlled by a PC recording the price of oil and the ocean's temperature.

14. The Deep Listening Band - Rain Delay

In 1989 The Deep Listening Band (Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis with guests Fritz Hauser and Julie Lyon Balliett) explored the sound properties of the Tarpaper Cave in Rosendale, New York. Rain Delay is from the 1990 CD Troglodyte’s Delight (¿What next?).

15. Asmus Tietchens - Hydrophonie 18A

Asmus (born Hamburg 1947) has contributed an excerpt from his series of experiments with dripping water from the early 1980's, previously released on the CD Seuchengebiete 3.

16. Kevin Schlei - Drop

Drop (2006) was a major live electro-acoustic work composed entirely from the sights and sounds of dripping water by this Milwaukee-based composer.

17. Claudia Wegener - Round The Fountain

A new composition for the CD, a breaking up of the line  three water rays dribble into three round pools from the 24hrs (EAST) set of recordings. Claudia (aka RADIO CONTINENTAL DRIFT) is a listener with a bag who explores how environments may become audible through language.

18. AD&THEFILMTAXI - 

A rumination on waste during the period 1994-2008 in collaboration with some of those who left.

19. Jeff Young  and Alan Dunn - Chapter III (ocean)

20. George Cisneros - Music For Dripping Water

A short excerpt from the 45-minute master tape of San Antonio-based Cisneros’ 1981 installation Music for Dripping Water. Water was recorded dripping onto an array of hubcaps placed beneath the eaves of the composer’s home studio during a Texas rainstorm. A single microphone captured these sounds as ‘live’ signal sources for manipulation. 

21. Sneha Solanki - NS 246883: The Other Space

Sneha recently spent time recording sonar and electromagnetic activity at Scottish military sites. This track comes from a series of test underwater recordings at Gare Loch, home of the Trident missiles, with the title indicating the national grid coordinates of the recording's location.

22. Jodi Cave - Incidental Melody For A Dripping Tap

A graduate of the prestigious Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, Jodi has composed a new work using a tap dripping into a pan: ‘there are some guitar string sounds too which are played by the drips using small speakers on the strings, picking out the resonance of the drips. In a sense, the water is playing the piece.’

23. Sirpa Jokinen - Watering My Plants

From the installation Conversations with plants at the University Botanic Gardens in Helsinki (2008), we hear Jussi Lehtonen changing the soil in his plants, humming affectionately and privately as he carefully waters them in the bathroom. Showering the dirt away from the tiled floor afterwards, his short and ritualistic cycle is complete, in the spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

24. Gregory Büttner - Tischbrunnen (edit)

Born in Hamburg in 1972, Gregory has contributed excerpts from the heizung raum 318 CD composed entirely of the sounds produced within a single room, including the gurgling water of the radiator. 

25. Jeff Young and Alan Dunn - Chapter IV (ritual) 

26. AD&THEFILMTAXI - X

X is a collection of ten notable drips, involving Smog listening to demos, Perkins on the phone to Hitchcock, the 9:30 men's room during a DK gig, the baptism of Alan Bennett's niece and the Philippines national football team following their 3-0 victory over Bhutan. 

27. Susan Collins - Dripping Water

A short excerpt from Susan’s Introductory Exchanges installation (1993). A series of audio devices were placed at intervals along the Woolwich Foot Tunnel under the Thames with sounds, including dripping water, activated by passing viewers. Recorded onto looped answering-machine cassette tapes, the audio was played through walkmans and tiny amps and collaged with the reverberant audio of the tunnel itself.

28. Oliver Bernard - It’s Raining (Guillaume Apollinaire, 1916)

English language version of Il pleut, recorded 2008.

29. Kaffe Matthews - August Rain In New York Doorways

The heat bursts in wet that brings us out in doorways to cool in it.

Kaffe Matthews, New York (2007)

30. Jitender Shambi - Water Runs Out, Dishes Still To Be Washed

11.30am on Tuesday 8th July 2008 in the kitchen of a second floor flat in New Delhi opposite a railway line, a water tank empties out into a basin of steel dishes.

31. Jeff Young and Alan Dunn - Chapter V (parachutes)

32. Ben Parry and Tom Rae Smith - The Last Drop At The Edge Of The World

The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall and at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past, nor the shadow of the future.

Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (1922)

And what if the river runs dry, when there is no source, no water at the mouth, nothing . . .

THE COLLECTION: CD2

1. Ben Patterson - Drip Music (George Brecht, 1959)

In researching this project, the question was sent to George Brecht, via the Ludwig Musum, regarding using a version of his 1959 Fluxus score Drip Music as a cornerstone of the Collection. A month or so later came a simple 'yes' via his wife Hertha. In 2002, the same year that he was interviewed by tenantspin's Josie Crawford at the 40 Years Of Fluxus event in Wiesbaden, Ben Patterson revisited Drip Music: ‘I decided to re-examine the original score (below), rather than rely on my memory of performances of the traditional interpretations of these works. Thus, I discovered that Brecht's original instructions allowed for both a single source or multiple sources of dripping water. Remembering George’s first career as a chemist, employing laboratory equipment to produce multiple, dripping sources seemed appropriate.’

2. Jack Behrens - Water Music (John Cage, 1952)

With kind permission from Edition Peters, we are able to include Cage's Water Music  performed by Jack Behrens in 1990 at the Winter Music Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. Jack lecturers in composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Canada and first met Cage in 1960. With the sound of falling water implied as much as presented, Water Music is an important pre-Drip Music work. 

3. Hoor-Paar-Kraat - A Sudden Attack Of Conscience

The track, built around the sound of dripping water and chiming bells, was recorded in 2005 in Coral Springs, Florida, by Anthony Mangicapra, Duane Hosein and Jasper Delani, and is a Goat Eater Arts production from the CD Mercurial Little Jitterbug.

4. VOID OV VOID - Drippings Echo

A 9-minute composition by Japanese artists Tetra Tanizaki and RAI from the CD Water in the forest, recorded on the South Japanese island Yakushima for their own Kanata Music label.

Credits

Compiled by Alan Dunn and Jeff Young, to be given away free of charge during the exhibition EdgeCentrics curated by Jolanta Jagiello at the Williamson Tunnels, Liverpool, September 2008. cantaudio029. Links to artists’ websites and supporting material: www.alandunn67.co.uk.

Mastered at Dead Frog Studio in Lancashire and manufactured by MediaHeaven in Leeds. Cover image: buckets in the Williamson Tunnels by Alan Dunn. Inside image: Ben Patterson performing Brecht’s Drip Music in 2002, courtesy of Bertrand and Claudia Clavez with thanks to Didier Tatard. CD surface images: modified Williamson Tunnels map by Alan Dunn. Booklet front cover: Dick Higgins performing Drip Music in 1962 at the Fluxus Festival in Nikolai Church, Copenhagen, image by Sisse Jarner, courtesy of Eric Andersen with thanks to Hannah Higgins, Department of Art History, University of Illinois at Chicago. Booklet back cover: Jack Behrens and John Cage at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1991, image by Timothy Percevecz. Il pleut on p2 is from Apollinaire Selected Poems translated by Oliver Bernard and is reproduced with the kind permission of Anvil Press Poetry. Parachutes on p10 is by Jeff Young.  drip on p11 is by Edinburgh-based nick-e melville from the series eight rain poems (see www.logolalia.com).

With thanks: Dr Alfred M. Fischer (Museum Ludwig, Cologne), Helen Gillespie (Libraries and Archive Canada), Richard Green (President of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives), Janet Adams (The Le Caine estate), Andrew Kemp (Peters Edition Limited), Alga Marghen, Allen Bukoff, Jim Thirwell, Matmos, Jah Wobble, Amy Buscombe, Margit d’Errico-Reks (Sekretariat Prof. Kasper König, Museum Ludwig), Professor Colin Fallows, Brigitte Jurack, Paul Draper (Dead Frog Studio), Kit Yee Wong (Anvil Press Poetry), Paul Lines (MediaHeaven), Stour Valley Arts, LUX, PawnShop, staff at the Williamson Tunnels and all the artists who freely contributed to this project. For tours of the Tunnels, phone 0044 151 709 6868 or see www.williamsontunnels.co.uk.

Recommended listening

Spandau Ballet Innocence and Science, Disco Inferno In Sharky Water, Christian Marclay Bottled Water, glass bottle and reels of tape with the sound of dripping water (1990), Sakamoto and Takatani LIFE, Toru Takemitsu Sky, Horse And Death, one of the first pieces of electronic music in Asia, sourced from various recordings including dripping water (1954), Tim Ovens Water Music (1990), William Raban Waterfall (1983), film of Ron Haselden’s installation Graving Docks, Tan Dun Water Cadenza, Smog The Well and Blacksand Barn.

Yours arts MP3, this weeks brings you news from  Art in Liverpool FM, The Liverpool Biennial, The Independents and Le Corbusier. Plus what’s opening in the Visual Arts in Liverpool this week.

We both have biennial fever and have been so busy seeing things that we haven't had a great deal of time to chat or keep the respective websites up to date. So biennial, biennial, biennial  

On Monday 18th February I was delighted to be invited by artist Alan Dunn to take a short tour of the Queensway Tunnel to mark the launch of his project Soundtrack for a Mersey Tunnel. I had originally planned to conduct an audio interview with Alan and cut it into highlights of the tracks but never found the time - so here presented is a audio tour of the Mersey Tunnels.

I never got a recorded interview but there is a written interview about the Soundtrack for the Mersey Tunnels project - Read more here.