About this Event
TWO WORLDS ~ Audio Visual Installation and Live Performance
By Fiona Brehony & Simon Knighton
featuring Johnny Hunter (drums) and Joe Shute (spoken word)
Thursday 22nd October
Installation 7-8pm | Live performance 8-9pm
Islington Mill Gallery
1 James Street, Salford, M3 5HW
Two Worlds began from a series of dawn recordings by research practitioners Fiona Brehony and Simon Knighton, capturing nocturnal sounds and birdsong along the River Irk in North Manchester - a waterway running through one of Britain's most historically overlooked neighbourhoods, now at the centre of a major regeneration project.
The resulting work holds two sound worlds in tension: natural rhythms of water, birds and wind against an industrial hum of cars, construction and machinery along the banks. Field recordings are triggered generatively, a computer sequencing material by probabilities set by the artists, producing an ever-changing improvisation that mirrors the river's shifting patterns. Like river, city and body, this piece exists always in flux - never fixed and constantly in flow. Community voices, gathered over the preceding year, weave through it, carrying the lived experience of a neighbourhood in transition.
In performance, Brehony, Knighton and drummer Johnny Hunter present the work as a live installation, joined by writer Joe Shute, who reads his own poetry drawn from the River Irk. Screens play cityscapes and water around them as voices, live poetry, drums and sound move together between river, city and body, all improvising as one.
Two Worlds continues an ongoing collaboration between Brehony and Knighton, and forms part of a wider body of work asking what it means to listen to overlooked waterways, and whose voices are heard during urban regeneration.
Event venue & nearby stays
Islington Mill, 1 James Street, Salford, United Kingdom
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