High-Lands

outlandia_570_380In August 2014 I was lucky enough to have been invited to take part in Remote Performances, a series of live commissions for radio, that was put together by London Fieldworks in association with Resonance 104.4fm. Many of the works were broadcast from Outlandia, an incredible tree-house artists’ studio that London Fieldworks had built high in the larch forest that overlooks the Ben, in Glen Nevis. The radio studio (every part of which had needed to be lugged up a steep mountain path by the Resonance crew) was powered by two silent, hydrogen power cells, each no bigger than shoe-box.

I was commissioned to write a short story for Remote Performances. The result is ‘High-Lands’, which I performed as a live reading from Outlandia, against a soundscape accompaniment by Johny Brown of the Band of Holy Joy. I blogged about ‘High-Lands’ at the time, on the Remote Performances microsite.

Here is the audio, as a lowish-res MP3 for accessibility.

As ever, please feel free to download the file in order to play it on your own device. (If you use a Firefox browser, try using the Download Helper add-on).

Video still © Inga Tillere, 2014

Video still © Inga Tillere, 2014

‘High-Lands’ also draws on my current loose research collaboration with the artist Stuart Brisley, which has been funded by CreativeWorks London through a residency at King’s College London. Together with ‘The Holborn Cenotaph’, it is one of two short stories intended as prototypes or test-pieces, after a method adopted by the French poet Louis Aragon in writing his novel about Henri Matisse: ‘a kind of trial approach to my theme, a marginal commentary on [his] method, in order to justify the liberty taken with my subject, my own variations, the sort of detachment I aimed at.’

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Liliane Lijn and Tony White: Readings and Conversation at October Gallery, presented as part of the events programme to accompany their current exhibition: William S. Burroughs: Can You All Hear Me?

Saturday 17 January 2015, 3pm. Admission £7 Concessions £5, BOOKING ESSENTIAL