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Tag: concrete island

Sounds from a Concrete Island

I’m sure there are some of you who’ve already heard of UK sound artist Janek Schaefer. He has, after all, been recording and creating sound installations for past 20 years, and he even won the British Composer of the Year award in Sonic Art a few years ago. But, personally, I hadn’t heard of Schaefer until I heard a track from his new album on Tom Ravenscroft’s BBC 6Music radio show this evening.

Lay-by Lullaby, released this week on the 12K music label, uses “location recordings made in the middle of the night above the M3 motorway, right at the end of the road where JG Ballard lived, a couple of miles from Schaefer’s studio on the far west edge of London.”

Now, admittedly, the M3 has a special place in my psyche — I drove up and down it rather a lot in my late teens, often late at night — but more significantly Ballard also wrote his “seminal works on car culture” — Crash (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) — as the motorway was being built past the front of his house.

Schaefer’s 73 minute album was created last year as an installation for his show ’Collecting Connections’ at the Agency gallery in London. Apparently the sounds were played on infinite loop through a car radio installed in a little leather travel case and amplified by a pair of reclining traffic cones.

In other Ballard news, director Ben Wheatley announced earlier this week that he would start shooting his adaptation of High-Rise in June with Tom Hiddleston in the lead role.
High-Rise
The teaser poster for the film was created by artist Jay Shaw. You can read more about Shaw’s work, including his poster for Wheatley’s current film, A Field in England, which opened in New York this week, in Adrian Curry’s column for MUBI this week.

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