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CAT PRINT

by | Feb 28, 2023

CAT PRINT

A player-piano replays a recording of a cat that walked across the keys 30 years ago. The piece illuminates the death and revivification inherent in all mechanical recording. As the keys visibly repeat the act of being depressed, they reveal the imprint of the live body and follow the negative space of the creature. As with the piano rolls that recoded Rachmaninov playing his own music in 1919, the observer is attending a kind of séance and the random, spontaneous, and unrepeatable elements are extrapolated back to the player and composer as a kind of signature of presence and authenticity.  In Cat Print, the same is true although it is composed (almost) entirely accidentally.

CAT PRINT was shown in the group sound-art show at Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Greenwich, not necessarily in the right order Feb – April 2023

VIDEO CAT PRINT

Lost Chord

by | Aug 24, 2022

Lost Chord Underpass

LOST CHORD

Lost Chord is a social musical work currently being researched. Sets of organ pipes are carried through the landscape, each pipe resonating with its own voice. It is a relational work at both a sonic and human level with the drift of travel, the constraints of landscape, the labour of the task and the collective process of the group all determining the nature of an unrepeatable band of sound. The work exploits the psychoacoustic effect of the drone on the carrier and the observer alike and inevitably, while taking place in the secular world, has magical and religious resonances.

 Lost Chord is supported by Arts Council England

VIDEO LOST CHORD STUDIO

LINKED

by | Aug 17, 2022

Re-link
LINKED transmitter
Claremont Road Nets

LINKED

Commissioned by the Museum of London, Graeme Miller’s ongoing project opened in July 2003 as a massive semi-permanent sound work and off-site exhibition of the contemporary collection of the Museum of London. It is arguably the largest sculptural entity in the capital

Stretching across from Hackney Marshes to Redbridge, the M11 Link Road was completed in 1999 after the demolition of 500 homes, including Miller’s own, amid dramatic and passionate protest. Concealed along the three-mile route, 20 analogue transmitters continually broadcast hidden voices, recorded testimonies and rekindled memories of those who once lived and worked where the motorway now runs. The narratives encapsulated go back almost 100 years and run up until the last drastic moments of these buildings. They appear as they are recalled and spoken about.

Over these years some of the transmitters have been lost – to a lorry crashing into a lamppost, to accidentally being taken down by contractors, to weather, time and entropy. Amazingly many have endured and have become an almost secret layer of the landscape of East London. It is not only time to refurbish this work, but time to look at how it works in time and how public art endures or de-commissions itself.

With this in mind Graeme Miller is currently looking to stage Re-LINK taking place September 24th and 25th 2022: the first annual 48-hour restoration of the entire network that will also include a reflective public conversation between former residents, interviewees and interviewers, sound and radio artists, eco-activists and, as ever, the wider curious walking public

 

Read 2003 Catalogue Essay THE ARITHMETIC of BELIEF by Alan Read

Transmitter Excerpts

Comet in Moominland

by | Aug 10, 2022

Comet in Moominland

Released on Finders Keepers Records, Graeme Miller’s new score for the Film Polski, “fuzzy felt” Moomins follows the adventures of the Moomins as they struggle to deal with apocalyptic events. This adds to the collection of releases on the label of the original TV themes by Graeme Miller and Steve Shill. The score was performed live-to-picture in 2017-18  by Graeme Miller and Jamie Telford at UK venues including Blue Dot Festival, Festival Number 6, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Royal Albert Hall.

 

Re-LINK

by | Aug 10, 2022

Re-link

Re-LINK

Hear/walk LINKED: Green Man Roundabout Leytonstone
Saturday 24th 10 – 6 Sunday 25th  12 – 6  COLLECT YOUR FREE RECEIVER AND MAP. Walk as much or little as you wish. The entire installation is 3 miles long and walking and listening to it all can take  half a day.

Sound Table: The Hall, Leytonstone Library 24th September 3-5 FREE BUT TICKETED

 

For 48 hours Graeme Miller’s seminal radio installation, LINKED will live again. Arguably the largest sculptural entity in the capital, it is comprised of 20 analogue radio transmitters that stretch for 3 miles along the edges of the M11 Link Road in East London marking and re-building the 500 houses demolished for the road. It opened in 2003 as a semi-permanent installation and as part of the collection of the Museum of London.

The transmitters broadcast on a single frequency and with a receiver the walker is able to navigate the neighbourhoods adjacent to the motorway finding pools of sound that relate to the specific locations. Each surviving transmitter has now broadcast more than a million times where the voices of former residents describe and revive the lost spaces. Over 19 years this work about the politics and poetry of place has become increasingly about time itself and the transmitters themselves have suffered its effects making LINKED an almost secret and cult work.

Re-LINK, the first of an annual series of such gatherings, invites the public to collect a receiver and discover the work fully restored. It is a chance for those who know the work to experience it again and for lost narratives to be heard once more. In the afternoon of Saturday 24th in the art deco hall of Leytonstone Library a Sound Table, a rolling studio dialogue will invite a changing mix of former residents, writers, artists, activists, interviewers, interviewees and passers-by to hear each other and consider the themes and shifting meanings of this public work.

Re-LINK is part of Sound Walk September

VIDEO Re-LINK STUDIO