• Ring Road Ring (centripetal mix) - Concrete USB drive

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  The sound contained on this concrete USB drive is made up of recordings of the low level vibrations of the Coventry Ring Road, a Brutalist super-structure built in the 1950s to accommodate the rise of the automobile and the emergent vision of Coventry as a motor city with a pedestrian heart. Contact microphones were attached to the pylons that support the road, at a number of points around the ring, and what you hear are the secret sounds of a much-maligned, misunderstood, and melancholy structure.
  
  Bound up in this elevated roadway made out of cast concrete is the complexity of thousands of years of economic, political, cultural and chemical processes leading to a situation in which fossil fuels in the form of petroleum distillate are burned in the bellies of four-wheeled combustion engines, propelling humans around and around a circular elevated roadway, every day. This elevated roadway is made out of another ancient but modern material. Concrete has fulfilled dreams of moulding and shaping space to our desires since the time of the Romans, though its real moment came with the turn of the 20th century.
  
  In this project I have been particularly interested in listening deeply to sounds emanating from the structures of the built environment of Coventry city. None manifests the anthropogenic interests of the 20th century as precisely as the Coventry Ring Road, and as such it offers itself as a prime oracle, a privileged site to hear of the shifts that have happened, are happening, and might well happen in the future. The challenge lies in language, as I do not speak Ring Road. Though it is verbose, it lacks legibility, and I lack fluency in the particular sonic idiom of concrete.
  
  The contact mics I attached to concrete pylons, looked a little like EEG electrodes attached to a patient, or, alternatively, like lie-detector electrodes attached to an interviewee. The process could be understood as a kind of interview, test, analysis. A talking-cure. A psychoanalytic sounding of the Coventry Ring Road. The album is the result of an attempt to put the megastructure under analysis. The first track is the transcript, the documentation of the Ring Road’s free association, an account of its dreams. The remaining tracks function as attempts to interpret this text, a set of hypotheses, a bringing to the surface of some of the underlying conflicts, desires, fantasies, drives…
  
  Note: the USB drive contains both a linear and looping version of the track. The linear version is 6 mins long. An alternative mix of these sounds was released as an album entitled Ring Road Ring on vinyl and digital by Gruenrekorder in May 2020: gruenrekorder.bandcamp.com/album/ring-road-ring ... more
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