WORK
…the initial colonization of the Old World (now thought to have occurred one and a half million years ago, or even earlier) led to different homogenous human populations at the peripheries of the human geographic range. There, at the edges, evolutionary forces have different effects than they do at the center of a species’ range which, for humans, is Africa.
Race and Human Evolution, A Fatal Attraction: Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari
The Maker is part of a series of four works entitled Centre and Edge, which explores the sound world of a particular region rich in human and natural history, a region with its fair share of wilderness. The concept of ‘centre and edge’ is investigated across a range of topics: specific compositional practices, the production of space, the anthropology of place names, human intervention in the landscapes and soundscapes, paleoanthropology, bridges and boundaries, the natural history of Southern Scotland, to name a few.
The Maker, in common with the other three works in the series, gives the impression of a massive installation in which microphones have been left open for long durations in various outdoor spaces, attached to built structures such as fences and mountain huts, then all sources fed into the same listening space.
The wealth and complexity of vertical relationships between the various sound sources and their transformations helps the work to defy linear time and to simply exist as a living moving organic whole between and beyond the speakers.
BIO
James Wyness is a composer and environmental sound artist based in the Scottish Borders. In his live work he combines layered field recordings and sonic interventions in the landscape with the live manipulation of found objects to create a series of fabricated environments. A constantly shifting mass of natural elements in motion contrasts with representations of wide open spaces, ambiences in which native sounds and human interventions merge, inviting the listener to navigate through deeper listening the time and space of the work.
