Luke Madams
The Machinery

Not every available piece of space needs to be filled with something. This was my thinking when I learned that Graveney marshes, an area of immense beauty and tranquillity outside of my hometown of Faversham, Kent, are set to become the site of the UK’s largest solar power station. The site will house a superstructure larger than the nearby town itself, comprising a supposed 196,539 steel foundational pipes, 880,000 12-foot-high solar panels, metal and glass and all, dwarfing the comparatively feeble soon-to-be second-largest solar power station by a factor of seven and probably evicting countless colonies of birds and reptiles along the way. 

 Some people have viewed this as a bad thing. Yet, what is undoubtedly true is that the country and indeed the planet’s need to increase its capacity to produce and store green energy is pressing; a non-negotiable, even. I was struck by the irreconcilable incongruity of these facts. Having walked the area countless times during my life in the town, I can attest to its beauty—sitting between two places, but being ‘within’ neither of them, you walk for hours without encountering another person along miles of sea wall that must have been built by somebody at some point. Decimating the area seems a treasonous act, but, then, hand-waving the matter until the station is built elsewhere is probably condemning it and places like it anyway. 

 I wanted to capture this sense of ambiguity in sound, and employed the ideas I had grappled with during a foray into Spectral music and recent scholarship that has sought to reframe it under the banner of Gérard Grisey’s original favoured term for the movement: Liminal music. Liminality, the ‘in-between’, suggests a music that incorporates into its language the properties of sound at its most fundamental level, devoid, as a result, of barriers between states and indeed between what might be considered distinct parameters. 

 Beginning with my own recordings of the sound environment of Graveney marshes, the piece attempts a smooth, imperceptible shift from recorded sound to synthetic sound, before transitioning into material recorded with a phone-coil pickup to sonify the behaviour of various electronic devices, including some from power stations. Along the way, partials from this latter material are isolated and subjected to individual compositional processes, taking them through a variety of tunings before recasting them in a different format and a tuning system that might be said to be less ‘natural’. The listener is invited to investigate the other processes at play during the piece, and to consider, loosely, a suitably ambiguous theme of ‘natural versus unnatural’ throughout. My Max patch makes heavy use of probability gates, volume threshold gates, and random numbers, the parameters of which are fully adjustable. As such, I have created three recordings of varying lengths with different parametric adjustments to illustrate the difference that can be achieved between performances. The piece is most effective at longer durations. 

 The piece came to be, for me, a lamentation of sorts for the natural spaces that are being lost and will be lost to projects like the one threatening Graveney marshes. Campaigns such as Rewilding Britain advocate a hands-off approach to conversation, and others like it remind us of the merits of keeping space untouched for the sake of it. I keep a drawer in my bedroom deliberately empty for precisely this reason.