This album features sound recordings of the low-level vibrations pulsing through the megastructure that is the Coventry Ring Road. Built between the 1950s and 70s, it was a key part of the plan to rebuild Coventry after the devastation of World war II. The Ring Road was intended to keep traffic out of the city centre and form the basis for a radical vision of a modern pedestrian-focussed city. However, politics, economics and the contingencies of history combined to produce a situation in which the plan was compromised in a number of ways. Nowadays, the Ring Road has come to be seen as a misguided Modernist project that ended up deterring pedestrians and killing the city centre. The process of disassembling, mitigating, and repurposing the structure is already under way.

To capture these sounds I used contact microphones attached to the concrete pylons that support the road, at various points around its circumference. I was immediately surprised by how melancholy the ring-road sounds. The first track is a collage of field recordings from around the Ring Road. Most of the subsequent tracks take these recordings as raw material from which to build a series of poetic interpretations of the lifeworld of the Ring Road. The final track adds induction coil recordings of the electromagnetic fields that surround and emanate from the structure, including the flittering fragments of the EM fields dragged around by traffic passing above.

"This is some fascinating music; dark and elegant, quiet and peaceful. And yes, that is perhaps a strange thing for recordings of a Ring Road." - Frans De Waard, VITAL WEEKLY

"Michael Lightborne‘s previous record for this label was the excellent Sounds Of The Projection Box, released in 2018 as a beautifully packaged LP record with plenty of photographic illustrations of his theme. He made documentary recordings of the sounds of projection booths in UK cinemas, but also contextualised the work with his detailed, well-considered annotations and observations. That rigour is much in evidence on today’s record, Ring Road Ring (GRUEN 195). [...] There are numerous concrete pillars supporting this road, and this is where Lightborne attached his microphones to collect his field recordings. These are presented on the record; first as a long (10:53) piece, the title track in fact, which collages and layers a number of the original recordings together into a mini-symphony of grey, droning sounds. There follow a number of shorter pieces, with titles such as ‘Fortran’, ‘Moebius Loop’ and ‘Shepherd Tone’, which use the original recordings but subjected to the imaginative processes of the composer; his aim is “to build a series of poetic interpretations of the lifeworld of the Ring Road”, which I find very poignant. The long track has a compelling, industrial bleakness which is hard to beat, but the shorter “poetic” tracks are just glorious; barely recognisable as traffic sound, what emerges is mostly the sense of constant vibrations and the shifting of inert building materials, transformed by the composer’s art into a form of droning process music. [...] It’s as though the architecture itself was in revolt, protesting the weight of traffic that has been passing over its surfaces for 50 years; the whole LP emerges as a Dantean portrait of a modern urban Hell, a bleak image of futility." - Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector


7 Tracks (32′47″)
Vinyl (300 copies)

This album was produced as part of Sensing the City, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project that investigates the urban space of Coventry City (warwick.ac.uk/sensingthecity).

Thanks to: Nicolas Whybrow, Natalie Garrett Brown, Emma Meehan, Carolyn Deby, Nese Tosun, Sarah Shalgosky, Fiona Venables, Rachel Moseley, Pete Ashton, Roland and Lasse at Gruenrekorder, Denise Pigott, and Ezra Gene.

All recordings made by Michael Lightborne in the city of Coventry.
Artwork and photography by Michael Lightborne.

Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder
Germany / 2020 / Gruen 195 / LC 09488