13 Jan 2012

Hutong Looming

Stretched out on a blond wood frame in Brighton Museum's World Art gallery is a Chinese woven robe with wide sleeves and a crossed-collar - technically a relatively recent version of a Han-style court yi I think.

I remember years ago pointing out this robe in the glass cabinet to each of my children on those days when a brisk tour of the Museum was a convenient staging point after a dip in the municipal swimming pool before we headed back up the hill home for a lunch of sandwiches with their crusts cut off, sliced kiwi fruit and chopped carrots.

Through a friend at London College of Fashion, I managed to get into a textile studio to record a student working at a Dobby handloom. It was strange indeed, for once, to be recording in an interior environment, not having to counter gusts of wind or directing the short shotgun mic away from unwanted sound events. All was otherwise quiet, just the sun at the window, the bright varnished parquet floor and the clattering, rattling sound of the loom in action.

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For this Noli Me Tangere project for the Soundwaves Festival, I wanted to anchor the heard experience of craft activity - the loom's arrythmic cycles - within an environmental sense of place. I had been to Beijing once with work, interviewing potential students for places at our University. Everything about our short period there was conducted at such pace and pitch that down-time seemed, literally, a foreign concept. Nonetheless, we did get have a brief morning off before we had to board our flight home. After an excursion to the Yonghe Lama Temple and few rounds of haggling in the neighbouring street of shops selling religious tat - one of the results of which, a gold plastic, solar-powered prayer wheel I am looking at while typing this - I found my way into a narrow 'hutong'.

Having first visited a public urinal the size of small cupboard which had an ingenious thick khaki fabric door with a head height vinyl window stiched into it, I placed my little Zoom H2 recorder in my top pocket and set out to walk from the most deserted end of the hutong street to its busiest, moving steadily towards the traffic swirling around Dongsi North Road.

There was something very special about this little street. It was not as genteel as the hutong across the way where cafes selling beautiful teas rubbed shoulders with cool clothes stores and the Beijing Fixed Wheel Bike Shop. That other street was certain of its charms but my little hutong, in the half an hour I wandered around it with my tourist eyes and ears open, had a ruder, messier appeal, its miracles animated by the sounds of throats being cleared, goods arriving and being hawked, food getting cooked in the open, the voices of children and the elderly and the robust warmth of bodies jostling together in the grey cold morning air.

Layering these two recordings on top of one another - the loom and the hutong - gave me "Hutong Looming", the soundwalk that visitors to the Museum hear on their headphones when they entered the World Art Gallery.

 

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