boy you turn me
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Boy You Turn Me was a specially commissioned sound installation for Birmingham Book Festival 2011, supported by Arts Council England and the PRS Foundation For Music. The piece explored the hidden life of an empty shop in Birmingham’s Pavilions shopping centre using two layers of text and music, scored by contemporary classical composer Ailís Ní Ríain.
David created a fictional story from memories and comments collected from workers, shoppers and security staff in the Pavilions, from other local people he bumped into, and from research at the Birmingham City Archives & Heritage Service. He got a real sense of the history of the Pavilions, of the High Street, and of the shop, Natural World, which used to occupy the space, and he was also inspired by the octagonal counter in the middle of the abandoned retail space. This was exaggerated for the installation with an enclosure to divide the inner and outer soundscapes, and these could be experienced separately or at the same time by moving around the space. “The last tenant of the empty shop was a company called Natural World that sold crystals, jigsaws, plastic animals, fossils, sharks teeth - a little like a museum gift shop - and I have taken this as my theme for the story, making it a hymn to the ghost of a forgotten shop and a lament for the people who used to work there,” says David.
“It takes a short while to adapt to the different noises clashing together, but you soon become immersed in the world, natural or otherwise, being described”
Creative Times
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Read the Creative Times review here.
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David created a fictional story from memories and comments collected from workers, shoppers and security staff in the Pavilions, from other local people he bumped into, and from research at the Birmingham City Archives & Heritage Service. He got a real sense of the history of the Pavilions, of the High Street, and of the shop, Natural World, which used to occupy the space, and he was also inspired by the octagonal counter in the middle of the abandoned retail space. This was exaggerated for the installation with an enclosure to divide the inner and outer soundscapes, and these could be experienced separately or at the same time by moving around the space. “The last tenant of the empty shop was a company called Natural World that sold crystals, jigsaws, plastic animals, fossils, sharks teeth - a little like a museum gift shop - and I have taken this as my theme for the story, making it a hymn to the ghost of a forgotten shop and a lament for the people who used to work there,” says David.
“It takes a short while to adapt to the different noises clashing together, but you soon become immersed in the world, natural or otherwise, being described”
Creative Times
Check out this review here
Read the Creative Times review here.
< Back
Home
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An empty room full of sound: Boy you turn me
Pavilions Shopping Centre by Ed Gordon ‘The counter grew round me like a cage’ So says a disembodied voice, incorporated into the walls around me. I’m standing in the centre of this same counter: high sided, wooden, foreboding, enclosing, bathed in a red light. More voices talk at me from all sides – ‘take a tile and stretch it, and you have a cube’, ‘Hyacinths don’t like Napalm Death’ – as it mixes with yet more sounds coming from outside the booth. I’m in the micro-centre of a macro world, the two colliding in a cacophony, resulting in a disturbing and unsettling jumble of stories and sounds. Outside the noises get louder, with the incidental music rising above all else: flutes and clarinets mixing with the ephemera of shops and shopping, making it hard to hear the voices, and completely drowning out the narrative of the’ inner-sanctum’. Here stands ‘Boy you turn me’: The Birmingham Book Festival’s sound installation located at the Pavilions shopping centre, until Sunday. It is an intriguing concept – they have taken an unused shop in the heart of Birmingham’s shopping centre, and reinvested it with sound, story, and life, resulting in a bizarre separation between the sparse, empty cabinets and display shelves that cover the walls, and the unrelenting ‘busyness’ of the sounds. The story, of an affair between workers at the shop that was, is written by David Gaffney after interviewing shoppers, staff, security guards and anyone that he ‘bumped in to’, to help him gain a ‘real sense of history of High st., the shopping centre, and the shop’. I was impressed by the way that the story interacts with its environment: all talk of ‘cages’ and ‘tiles’ come when the audience is located in the places where the ‘cages’ and ‘tiles’ are most apparent, making the whole installation more engaging to the audience. By telling a narrative, a tangible story for people to listen and react to, as well as having music and ambient sounds, Gaffney makes sure he invests the listener with enough to keep them sold on the rather abstract concept. The incidental music that accompanies the narrative can at times be jarring and abrupt, though I think this is perhaps the point. When in the ‘cage’ at the centre of the room, all other noises fade away, though outside, the discordant woodwind-hit is more than noticeable. This result stems from Gaffney’s and Ailís Ní Ríain (the composer of the piece) deciding to play with ‘sound convention’ and remix the vocal narrative so that the levels are entirely different from where you would normally expect them to be. ‘It’s like’, Gaffney said, ‘being able to view a river from underneath, a completely new perspective.’ The result is an intriguing and unique installation that seeks to draw a, albeit fictional, story from its surroundings. Yet to describe a ‘sound’ installation with words is an ultimately futile task. It is interesting, free and right next to Waterstones. When you’re next in town, go and have a listen. It’s an experience you are not likely to forget about.  |
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