Floatsam - 27 minute sound art composition created for BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears

Flotsam is a 27 minute sound art composition created for BBC Radio 3's ‘Between the Ears’ in collaboration with the screenwriter Tessa Sheridan, a previous Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or short film category winner. The series ‘Between the Ears’ provides a weekly, primetime forum for broadcasting audio/sound art. Flotsam is a sound narrative drawing from Debord’s ideas of psychogeography (1955) specifically the precise effects of the environment, whether organised or not, on the behaviour of individuals.The River Thames was the focus of the research. One of the possible derivations of Thames is ‘tamasa’ (dark river) and Flotsam explores this darkness, particularly the suicides that frequently take place in the murky waters at night and the subsequent finding of bodies among the flotsam. Flotsam aims to evoke the river darkness through the use of spoken word and diagetic sonic elements. Diagetic is understood here to mean sound originating from within the world of the narrative and is close to the German Hörspeil diagetic tradition referenced by Oliveros (1998) and others.A key aspect of the research was that the sound texture, perspective, rhythm, level and tempo should not ‘respond to’ the spoken word but interleave with it so as to drive the narrative forward, at times appear to prefigure the states of mind that lead to certain words being spoken. Flotsam’s narrative unfolds both above and below the water, as a fictional journey towards, into and, finally, out of the river. A river that is never quiet. The piece included some underwater recording.Tessa Sheridan was responsible for the content of textual narrative, the casting, and the inclusion of John Greening’s poem ‘The Thames’ which won the Times Literary Supplement Centenary Poetry Award. Ed Kelly created all other aspects of the soundscape narrative.http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/betweentheears/pip/hcs6s/http://www.johngreening.co.uk/forthcoming.htm