A Heap of Stones
Audio installation and performance by Justin Bennett during the Oscillation Festival, Brussels
03/05/2025. Installation runs 15-18h. Performances at 16h and 17h.
A Heap of Stones is an ongoing project that focuses on the landscape, ecology, and culture around the village of Shap, UK. The area has a long and complex relation with stone, lying at the geological boundary between limestone and granite. It is home to many prehistoric stone monuments, such as stone circles and burial mounds. Stone has been extracted by industry there from Paleolithic times to the present day. Layers of sound are recorded and mixed on location, and when presented through multiple loudspeakers, they create a fictional space that emerges from the process of (re)listening to the landscape. The work combines the sounds of stones, water, weather, wildlife, and industrial machinery. The installation will be activated with a short live performance (time to be announced).
The 2025 edition of the festival Oscillation ::: The Weather will depart from practices around field recording. Field recording can be thought of as the registration of one’s listening environment. This registration may happen through microphones and a device, but might also include registration via the ear to memory or language. The field might be inside, outside, urban, rural, or domestic. Field recording can be intended as archival observation, as material for musical composition or radio emissions, or as listening practice. With such a broad scope of practices, it can raise questions from authenticity to ethics of authorship and appropriation, to geographies and changing environments.
The festival will link field recording to the weather as phenomenon, as metaphor, and as concept, able to cause poetic and beautiful effects but also to manifest radically destructive events. In both field recording and the weather we are reminded that environments are in perpetual change. They are affected by outside influences, and much of the surprise and interest in a place is the way it constantly throws up new constellations of events and impressions. There are patterns to weather, seasons and weather systems, but it remains impossible to fully predict and still more impossible to control.
Exploring weather as a general condition, informed by climate, temperature, humidity, pressure, and changes in atmosphere, the festival will present and discuss various practices of field recording and their use in art and science. Performances, walks, on-site workshops, and talks will provide the opportunity to experience different modes of listening to the environment, permeated by the various and varying phenomena that weather comprises.
Practical
Jean-Felix Hap Park
Chaussée de Wavre 508/
Steenweg op Waver 508
1040 Etterbeek, Brussels