Sounds of Walking Chapter 5.5.2 A Very Random Lockdown sound work mp3 file

<p dir="ltr">In the first Covid pandemic lockdown I decided that I would be walking from and back to my home for around 60 minutes. I walked for 42 days at different times of the day, spread from before dawn to dusk. Very early in this process I realised I was creating my second imaginary island. I recorded each day’s walk in a sound recording and in text. For the poetry I used a poetic form that I had not used before, the mesostic, a modernist/avant-garde poetic form. My use of the form allowed both a comment on my daily walk and a commentary on the emerging social and political events on each of the 42 days. However, driven by regulation and how far I could walk, it was my trace of the walks, that I incrementally drew on a map that drew out a shape. With time it achieved a constancy, a coherence, a becoming of place ... a small island.</p><p dir="ltr">This radio work was <i>A Very Random Lockdown: 42 days walking an imaginary island</i>. Working with 42 progressive, sequential 80-second sections of the recordings moving across days one to 42 sections I randomized the order in which they appeared, to produce a ‘re-creation’ that had unsequenced time, a timeless limbo that felt like it matched the random, chaotic zeitgeist of the first lockdown. Each track was accompanied by a spoken word recording in two parts: first a sequential phrase from the text in and one line from the horizontal text lines of the days mesostic.</p><p dir="ltr">This work is one of six selected for submission alongside my PhD thesis. Many of the other works discussed in my thesis can be found through my website ( <a href="https://martinpeccles.com/" target="_blank">https://martinpeccles.com</a> ) or Soundcloud ( <a href="https://soundcloud.com/mpeccles" target="_blank">https://soundcloud.com/mpeccles</a>).</p>