Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre

Following a week of research, experimentation and production at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre in 2021, Sound Re-dug brings together four artists working across sound, installation, radio broadcasts and performance. More about the artists, below.

Themes are: from ephemeral currents of field recordings to polyrhythmic oscillations and materials meeting in friction. The day will culminate in an open decks session, radio broadcast and communal meal on the lawn.

We also welcome Linda O'Keeffe of Non-Random Collective to the space. They will be sharing and working through their recent project with us. 'Evolving Ourselves with Unnatural Selection: Creating a Better You. A Better World' looks to establish an adaptive audio-visual space online for users to play with and explore the ethical questions brought on by human-computer interactions, such as with CRISPR sequencing. Linda O'Keeffe is Editor of the Interference Journal and Director of Women in Sound, Women on Sound.

Ashley Holmes is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sheffield working across sound, installation, radio broadcasts and performance. His practice is informed by ideas of ancestral transmission and collective memory to explore the ways sound recordings, music and oral histories document a relationship between race and the environment. He hosts Tough Matter, a monthly broadcast on NTS Radio and also facilitates Open Deck - a series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around relationships to sound.

Kelly Jayne Jones is a Manchester based artist making work that combines performance, installation and sound. She is mostly self taught and began working in DIY experimental noise music and her practice has expanded to include dance, gesture, sonic drawings, stone sculpture and film scores. She is interested in creating a multi-sensory experience that creates possible conditions for communication and exchange. Creating contemporary zones bordering quantum fictions, where communion may have the potential to explore our inner dimensions. She is currently exploring animist ideas around the breath and spirit of mountains and rivers and how we can reconnect with our planet by means of ancient and modern rituals. Her work traverses the emotions of desire and anxiety, the comfortable and uncomfortable edges of our inner spaces and social co-existence. She is interested in presence and performance as a site for potential transformation; interpersonally and communally.

Andrew PM Hunt, aka Dialect, is a composer and musician based in Liverpool whose work encompasses a multiplicity of approaches including field recording, improvisation and computer processing to produce delicate compositions which hint at the interdependent complexity of the natural world. His recent album "Under~Between" (RVNG Intl, 2021) was recorded with new music group Immix Ensemble and fuses electroacoustic techniques with chamber music instrumentation, drawing on his background as a songwriter to produce innovative work with a deeply emotive core. Current preoccupations include faith, religion and their relationship to modern ethics and ecology. As someone born on The Wirral he is also excited to explore the resonant iconography of his childhood, in particular Bidston Hill itself.

Quieting recently relocated to her birthplace in the North West of the UK, Quieting is a multi-instrumentalist, music producer visual artist and DJ whose work leans towards experimental electronic and dance floor orientated sounds. She finds fascination in movement and texture and has recently begun to work with found sounds, field recordings, oral history interviews and randomly generated sequencers into her practice. With an extensive background as a guitarist, vocalist and drummer in the UK’s punk, hardcore and DIY indie scenes Quieting’s music is infused with an urgency to connect people, places and politics at the intersection of polyrhythm and throbbing psychedelic soundscapes.