This piece was created primarily from sounds I collected from the ‘Big Pit’ Heritage Site in Blaenavon. My intention was to appeal to the listener’s most primal reactions and evoke the raw power of industrial noise, but also to instil the work with a feeling of mounting human spirit and mass movement that is initially suppressed but ultimately allowed to break forth.
With thanks to Big Pit Coal Mine and Heritage Site and The Blaenavon Male Voice Choir.
Brass Players:-
Trumpet- Ali Kidd
Horn- Simon Jones
Trombone- Gareth Robinson
Tuba- Rob Graham White
listen below:
“On my visit to the ‘Big Pit’ coal mine, I was first struck by the stillness and calm of a place once so full of movement and noise. The silence seemed incongruous, hanging in the air like an almost palpable force. This feeling of suppressed energy was reinforced by the piles of heavy industrial material strewn across the site, now rusted and held down by weeds, becoming part of the landscape itself. The idea then came to use these materials and the machinery on the site as the basis of my piece. My thought was to give them movement and record the results, then organise the sounds in such a way that recalls and reinvigorates this once dynamic and thrilling human enterprise.
An aspect of the Industrial Revolution which I felt shouldn’t be overlooked in my project is this element of human enterprise, the mass body of the workforce and all that entails: On one hand the exploitation of an emerging working class but also the incredible explosive energy that comes from an increasingly self conscious mass body. To breath some humanity into the piece I decided to explore Blaenavon further, talk to some of the town’s residents and see to what extent the industrial labour that took place at the coal mines still lingers in cultural memory. My search brought me to Blaenavon Male Voice Choir, which has been rehearsing and touring for nearly a hundred years and still includes a number of former miners. The recordings I made with the choir not only provide a textural contrast to the sounds recorded at Big Pit, but I also hope that they begin to infuse the piece with a feeling of mounting human spirit, to reflect the struggle of the workers in the South Wales coal field, of which Blaenavon was an epicentre. “
