Category: Walking
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“What if the shoe is warmer than the land:” Niillas Holmberg “Underfoot”
“Underfoot” can be read as a single poem that tracks its way across a whole book. Its verses appear as clusters of lines that are pressed together towards the foot of the publication, occasionally joined by another cluster across the gutter, each cluster often separated by an interval of several wordless pages. In the 2022…
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Innspilling
I arrived in Tromsø a couple of days ahead of our Arctic Auditories schedule so that I could spend the weekend recording, trying to test an idea that has been gestating ever since my ears were pricked by a comment from Annabelle’s March 2022 soundwalk. Just a casual remark during the debriefing, but the idea…
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Lichen Memories
I remember an outing in Autumn 2019, when Katrin, Britta and I turned left at the top of the unmetalled path that led from our fjordside cabin and followed the wet tarmac through the dripping pine woods, past the baying sledge dogs and along another coastline before heading home. The trip was partly punctuated by…
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Sherpatrappa
The bar-borne earworm stayed embedded all the way until the steps beneath the unflapping flags; it slipped out somewhere higher upto leave an unnoticed stillness (but has just now re-insinuated inside). The birch wood perches spread surrounded energies all the way beyondmidnight; around the tree line, the birdsong baton passed to croaking crow acrobats (and the occasional…
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Sub-, Super-, Infra-, -Marine, -Aquatic
When last at Prestvannet, the whole expanse beyond the treeline was knee-deep in snow above an unmeasured layer of ice that was thick enough to support my weight. The clearing was where the “light you can hear” bled across the sky to be mirrored on the screens of cameras and phones. It was the same peeled-open area…
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Born of Cold and Mountain Air: Tarjei Vesaas: The Ice Palace
Once assigned by literary theorist Anna Westerståhl Stenport to a proposed genre of international metaphysical detective fiction – alongside Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Calvino’s Once on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Auster’s New York Trilogy – Tarjei Vesaas’s The Ice Palace certainly weaves complexity and rigorously wrought mystery within experimental and deliberately…
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“Beneath the Ice”
Kenneth Steven “Beneath the Ice: In Search of the Sami” recounts the author’s youthful infatuation with – and the subsequent developments of – what he calls “northern-ness,” a term he associates with CS Lewis, one that for Steven invokes “forests, wolves and snow that formed the backdrop to a mythic landscape; I even caught it…
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Walking the walk
Britta, Katrin and I walked the route that Katrin’s student had devised for our soundwalk experiment. We discussed distance, the possibility of fine-tuning the route, the balance of different environments, how stops might be staged and, later, how each section could be animated by focusing simultaneously on a new listening technique and on a specific…
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Truffle Seaweed
Jane took Katrin and I to the seashore to collect truffle seaweed (Vertebrata lanosa). The shoreline rocks were shrouded in snow, their shapes flared bright then turned to silhouettes as our head-torches danced. The darkness and the thick snow meant that every step was an exploration, I tried to test the terrain with each leading…