Liner Notes for Morgan Evans-Weiler's Correspondences III

In the summer of 2020, I was invited to join a search for two barrows in the countryside of the Sussex Downs in Southern England. Thought to date from the Bronze Age, the barrows were eventually found in private woodland, a location that had led them to be overlooked by previous archaeological surveys. Such barrows – mounds of earth or stones raised over a grave site – are found throughout the Downs. The newly discovered site is flanked by the well-known ‘Devil’s Jumps’ just a few miles north, and the ‘Devil’s Humps’ atop the ridgeway of a neighbouring valley.

Walking through the undergrowth, trying to define the contours of each barrow and taking note of their position in the landscape – on the spur of a hill looking toward an Iron Age hillfort, itself built upon a Neolithic causewayed enclosure – felt like an act of compression. It became an articulation of human duration, as a straight line drawn between an obscured culture and our own. Against all that isn’t recorded of past practices and customs, the discovery of these remnants in the landscape is a reminder that our age is one that we share with this culture: a shared geologic time, their tools still sharp. Our permanence in the landscape is made manifest, our lines of sight recognised to be the same, obscured only by trees and cities.

In the context of geological time, the period between the construction of the barrows and their rediscovery by an archaeologist (with me in tow), passes in what Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes as a “riot of short chapters”, in which our perceived permanence becomes like the “flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain”. This also relates to geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls ‘timefulness’,the habit of seeing things “not merely as they are now, but also recognizing how they evolved—and will continue to evolve—over time […] perceiving the world in four dimensions.” The scale of geological processes renders the duration of human culture visible and offers a radical image of the translucency of time.

Shortly after the barrows were uncovered, Morgan Evans-Weiler invited me to realise a new score intended to be interpreted as both sound and sculpture. For me, these are similar materials: one, a contouring of duration, the other, a contouring of matter. Both are made coherent through processes of composition and/or placement in space. The resulting interpretation of the score (durations, periods, images) corresponded with my experiences of walking in the Downland landscape and of reading both Tsing and Bjornerud.

The sense of correspondence was extended by the invitation for Patrick Farmer to collaborate on the realisation. Made under Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, the necessarily remote collaboration foregrounded of the domestic. Homemade cassette recordings were posted to Patrick (with reference to Tsing’s ‘flushes of mushrooms’ as well as suggestions of slug sounds, and fizzing loam) and combined with Patrick’s own recordings and personal archive, and instrumental recordings from us both. The definitions within the score (grounded, linear, transparent, opaque, charged, natural) were allocated a type of sound, which were then arranged according to a structure informed by the branching of mycelium. A additional foundational layer of activity was imposed with a 24-minute representation of geologic time; loose markers suggesting the placement of sounds within the duration.

The sculptural images combine references to sound, such as Patrick’s recordings of washing kale, direct material references, and an extended parallel reading of the landscape and the score. The sculptures are flattened within the digital space we have all inhabited during the construction of the release.

Morgan Evans-Weiler’s Correspondences III realsied by Sarah Hughes and Patrick Farmer is released on Editions Verde (2022).