linda's – blog

As part of the Hebden Bridge Arts and Ecology Festival Open Space 70, I was asked to create a sgundwlak and sound mapping workshop. I was supported by the amazing Paul Knight, philosopher and land walker, to create a walk that would bring a group of people through a changing landscape of urban, rural and wild, where we would discover the traces of our anthrophony on the bio sphere, and then following this walk create sound maps of this journey. During the walks I introduced my listeners to three female listeners to enhance their listening experience, and to discover different ways of measuring their sonic experience from an ecological, sensory and personal perspective. They were Pauline Oliveros, Hildegard Westerkamp and Rachel Carson. I then explored my own approach to listening developed as part of my research.

Below are some images from the journey as well as some of the amazing maps my participants created. I constructed these little booklets to allow them write some of their experiences on the back, during the walk, and then map on the other side. It was a great day and I am so thankful that being part of the Propeller Ensemble Performance for the same festival allowed me the opportunity to create and run this workshop.

In 2020 I began a conversation with the composer Jack MacNeill of the propellor ensemble. He was interested in the work I had been doing in the field of acoustic ecology and the sound arts, particularly my community engaged approach, my focus on excluded voices, and the way I created outputs from performances, to installations and publications, in order to reach as wide an audience as possible. These conversations struck a real chord, as they allowed me to begin to explore the personal impact the research had on my everyday life. Sometimes to explore difficult topics you step a little outside yourself, perhaps as a coping mechanism. To have such a long and deep conversation allowed for a form of self reflection, and over the course of the past two years, I have placed these thoughts into the performances that Jack and the Propeller Ensemble have created and for which I have been invited to perform alongside with the absolutely amazing ecologist and ornithologist Mark Cocker. So in July this year I performed alongside Mark, Jack and two additional performers from the Ensemble at the Hebden Bridge Festival Open Space 70.  We performed together last year at Lancaster Arts, but this felt like an evolution and refinement of how we collaborate on stage. All of this stems from the podcast series Jack created as a result of conversations with a variety of arts, ecologists and theorists, and they are a staggering creation that can be accessed here.   

Below is a series of snapshots from that performance, listen through or skip through, but its a lovely piece to watch or listen to.

In October 2020 the record label Flaming Pines asked me to contribute a track to the 2nd edition of the album Footfalls. I had spent some of the summer in lockdown in the rural mountain village of La Fatarella northern Spain. It had been difficult to summon the interest to do field recording while everyone was scared of dying, the focus of my time there had been to continue recording the wind turbines in the region, however, I became more interested in the little moments of celebration taking place in the village. This piece was a document of experiencing those moments while trying to listen to the soundscape of wind farms. Click Here listen to the work.

Dawn Chorus on South Walney Nature Reserve from Linda O Keeffe on Vimeo.

As part of International Dawn Chorus Day May 7th 2017 I began a series of recorded walks starting at 4:30 this morning, through the South Walney Nature Reserve in Barrow. There are several distinct nesting sites on South Walney which means you have very different bird sounds as the dawn progresses.

I am not an ornithologist so all I can say for certain is that I have the bird sounds of Great Black-backed Gull, Lesser Black-backed Gull, Herring Gull, Greenshank, Redshank, Short-eared Owl, Eider duck, Canada Goose. The recordings were made in grassland, coastal and pond sites.

Eager ears with more knowledge than me will be able to name the other species.

10-day field recording trip in La Fatarella Spain – 9th-19th of August 2016.  

Acoustic Ecology Residency 2016

In August 2016 sound artist Linda O Keeffe and Composer Tony Doyle ran a sonic arts residency in the La Fatarella municipality in the northern Terra Alta of Spain. The village is located within a vast mountainous area.  During the summer the high temperatures parch the landscape, riverbeds dry up and fallen leaves and branches quickly turn brittle. The surrounding area consists of Finca’s (A piece of rural land, which typically has a farmhouse or cottage present). During the day crickets dominate the soundscape and at night the swallows.

2016 Sound Artists in Residence

The two residents were Robin Parmar and Matt Green.

Robin Parmar

Robin Parmar explores the poetics of place and memory by way of electroacoustic composition, non-ideomatic improvisation, experimental texts, and film. Works have appeared in Ireland, England, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Slovenia, Canada, and the USA. His compositions have appeared on several international labels. Albums include “…between…” (Gruenrekorder, 2014) with David Colohan of United Bible Studies, and “The Drones” (Stolen Mirror, 2013). Recent papers have examined the phenomenology of discontinuity in digital music, the “space” of Joy Division, and the screendance of Angela Conway. Robin lectures on Acoustics, Psychoacoustics, and Modalities of Listening at the University of Limerick. He is a doctoral student at De Montfort University, Leicester.

Matt Green

Matt Green is a lecturer, researcher and site-specific sound artist who holds a Phd in Sonic Arts. Matt’s previous practice includes Resounding Rivers (2010), which was commissioned by Belfast City Council and PLACE, Belfast and explored Belfast’s buried waterways via six concurrent sound installations housed externally throughout the city. In Hear, Out There: Madrid (2008) was a mobile sound work that addressed a culturally impoverished site in Madrid known as AZCA. For this work, Matt and his collaborators received a Spanish Ministry of Culture ‘Culturas 2008’ award. Each of Matt’s installations and mobile works, including those mentioned, are the outcome of an extensive programme of situated activity that includes field recording (the aural equivalent to photography and documentary); community collaboration; and onsite research, design and development.

During the residency we toured the Terra Alta region and the Ebro D’elta, in addition we got to experience festival season in the Tarragonna Region which happens every August. Over the coming months I will update on works created in response to the residency.

Images from residency.