KIERAN JENKINS
Composer / Field Recordist / Researcher
Mapping The Exterior is an audio-visual documentation of the Tata Steel site taken in February 2024, where the sounds of the coke ovens, steam cinches and blast furnaces were recorded shortly before their closure.
Heavens Full Of Static
In February 2024, shortly after the annoucment of the closure to large stations at Tata Steel in Port Talbot, Kieran visited the site to documented the sounds of the blast furnaces, coke ovens and other operational plants, all of which as of July 2024 have now permanently closed.
Reflecting on these closures and this epoch in the history of Welsh steel manufacturing where the subsequent loss of industry, identity and economic opportunity is felt deeply in Port Talbot, came the question of what this shift in labour being outsourced to electronic and technological systems might mean for the future.
Ratcliffe On Soar Power Station October 2024 - The final coal station to be decommissioned in the UK
To work toward exploring this question of humans and technology in the future of the 21st century, it was decided that a musical language would need to be established to explore a topic which invokes an array of responses, including mourning, melancholia and a deep realisation of lost futures. Therefore, the instrumentation and textural approach revolved around a dialogue between the organic and the synthesised - field sounds and electronics, the human and the machine. Not in competition, but rather an exchange between the two worlds and between the two contrasting languages.
The practice of field recording has been explored and adopted by artists and musicians since it's origins in electroacoustic music with Studio D'Essai, Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrete' movement.
For Heavens Full Of Static, whilst using the field recordings taken from Tata Steel were used in part as signifiers for place and time, the recordings were also exposed to additional experimental techniques and manipulation to create new meanings and applications for them that may offer alternate insights and approaches to both the albums narrative, and the creative process. These methods ranged from more familiar techniques such as experiments in time and pitch stretching, but also through working with granular synthesis as a compositional tool, where the grains of sound which are recalled and echoed were used for evoking memory, history and exploring a blurring between past, present and future.
Field recording session conducted at Ratcliffe On Soar power station post closure October 2024