Unearthings

The music is the landscape, and the landscape is the music, and we’re all tied to it by our shared history...

Unearthings is a series of transmissions inspired by the changing seasons and changing landscape of East Anglia, drawing on poetry, prose, found texts and field recordings.

It’s dry and arid, there’s been hardly any rain for weeks,and everything is parched. The yellowhammer has changed his onomatopoeic song, and he no longer sings of a little bit of bread and no cheese, but of another day in the anthropocene.

sharon sanderson - field recordings

robert sanderson - guitar

the cuckoo comes in april

he sings his song in may

in the middle of june

he changes his tune

and july he flies away

sharon sanderson - voice, and field recordings made in woodland near minsmere, suffolk

robert sanderson - guitar & gramophonics

The dark night is over and a new day begins...

sharon sanderson - field recordings (Kelling Heath)

robert sanderson - atmospherics

They that go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters;

These men see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.

For at his word the stormy wind ariseth, which lifteth up the waves thereof.

They are carried up to the heaven, and down again to the deep.

Their soul melteth away, because of the trouble.

They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end.

So when they they cry unto the Lord in their trouble he delivereth them out of their distress.

For He maketh the storm to cease, so that the waves thereof are still.

Then are they glad because they are at rest; and so he bringeth them unto the haven where they would be.

*

We navigated by stars,

charted our course by constellations,

carried cargo on the German Ocean from Lubek to Lynn

and fished for herring and cod

in the cold north waters.

We lined up with the church towers

as we pulled into port,

and carved our crude ships

on the pillars in the nave -

votive scratchings as we listened to long sermons

for the saints and the hammer-beam angels

to intercede for us,

and grant us safe passage.

And after the harbour has silted up

and after the river has changed its course

and after the town has hollowed out

and long after we have sailed from these shores

our graffiti ships will still be there

safe in the haven

of our souls.

*

sharon sanderson - field recordings & voice

robert sanderson - music, atmospherics & voice

An audio snapshot of Berlin

Darkness falls over Wuffinga-land, and an autumnal day comes to a close. Chieftains sleep forever in their buried ships, and Mrs. Edith Pretty consults the spirits, while Basil Brown, trowel in hand, scrapes away the soil of centuries. Sharon's on a patch of heathland recording the rutting red deer, before she realises that the beaten tracks have dissolved into the darkness, and she's now lost.

Sharon Sanderson - field recordings

Robert Sanderson - atmospherics

voices -

Professor H.C.Wyld, an academic and linguist, reading an extract from Beowulf

Basil Brown, a local self-taught archaeologist explaining how he discovered the remains of a buried ship at Sutton Hoo

A nocturnal set of music and incidental soundscapes designed to be listened to under the stars

1. gloaming

2. the nighttime is the best time of the day (finnish tango)

3. through the woods

4. music for bat detector & gramophone

5. the souls of unbaptised children wander the skies

tonight

sharon sanderson - field recordings & bat detectors

robert sanderson - atmospherics & instruments

all tracks by sanderson & sanderson

music for two nightingales and an ersatz cello

sharon sanderson - field recordings

robert sanderson - ersatz cello

f. scott fitzgerald reading the first verse of ode to a nightingale by john keats

nightingales recorded at westleton heath in suffolk

recorded early one morning in springtime at buckenham marshes near norwich

sharon sanderson - field recordings

robert sanderson - atmospherics