A Heap of Stones
Justin Bennett
"A Heap of Stones" is an ongoing project focussing on the landscape, ecology and culture around the village of Shap, UK. The area has a long and complex relation with stone. Situated on a geological border between limestone and granite, the area contains many prehistoric stone monuments (stone circles, burial mounds, etc.) Stone has been extracted by industry there from paleolithic times up until the present day, when some quarries and cement factories are still working while other quarries are being "re-wilded" to create nature reserves. For the rest it is an area of hill farming, mostly sheep.
For this installation “A Heap of Stones 1” I record situations with a single microphone, then use this recording as a kind of “score”: making another recording while listening to the first. I build up layers of sound in this way which, when presented simultaneously through multiple loudspeakers, create a fictive space which emerges from this process of (re)listening to the site. The piece combines sounds of water, weather, stone, wildlife and industrial machines.