Of This Parish at Audiograft 2014 · 28:02:14

On 13 March 2014, Of This Parish: Christchurch, Oxford, will be played as part of Audiograft’s Sound Diaries Concert

Since November 2013 we have been working with Felicity Ford, AKA Felix, the Oxford Society of Change Ringers and alumni from Oxford Brookes University and SARU practitioners on the realisation of a version of Of This Parish, which explores the territory of Christchurch Cathedral’s bells.

The idea of a ‘Parish’ – a common device used to delineate territory while also defining a sacred community – was an articulation of acoustic space: the Parish was the zone in which a church bell could be heard. This notion of ‘Parish’ as phonosphere is the point of departure for Of This Parish; a piece which explores the relationship between various acoustic spaces: the personal and the shared, the secular and the sacred, the near and the distant, the historical and the contemporary.

In the piece, four walks are made simultaneously by four synchronized sound recordists, all starting from the central location close to the bell tower of Christchurch to the sound of the ringing bells. When these field recordings are played through four corresponding pairs of loudspeakers arranged around the perimeter of the Holywell Music room, the recordings will begin with the integrated 8-channel surround recording; each recording rendering the acoustic scene from an only marginally different perspective to the others. However, as the recordists begin along their respective walks, only sounds loud enough to permeate each local environment – such as the bells – will permeate all four recordings. The rationale for the presentation of these four recordings in a single space is to provide the listener with an impossible listening experience, collapsing the entire acoustic territory of Christchurch bells into a single space.

Special thanks goes to Felicity Ford, aka Felix for organising the sound walks and producing the work in Oxford in collaboration with Simon Bond and the Oxford Society of Change Ringers. Also to the sound recordists: Sam Kidel, Victoria Bosher, Bruno Guastalla and Dimitris Batsis and to photographer Pier Corona.

The original version of Of This Parish was devised for Sul in Northern Portugal with the support of Binaural/Nodar, the Arts Council England and the Falmouth University’s Sonva.

Sound Diaries Concert

Place: Holywell Music Room, Holywell Street, OX1 3BN Time: 7pm Booking and more information: www.audiograft.co.uk.