Jonty Harrison

Voyages brings together two multichannel works by Jonty Harrison drawn from the sound library he has gathered since the early 1990s, when he began carrying recording equipment everywhere to capture everyday events that reveal where they happen. Espaces cachés (2014) was written for 30 channels, Going / Places (2015) for 32. Both are heard here in stereo Ambisonic UHJ encodings produced and mastered in 2016 by Joseph Anderson at the DXARTS Sound Lab of the University of Washington, with the Ambisonic Toolkit.

Espaces cachés, commissioned by the Maison des arts sonores and premiered at the Klang ! festival in Montpellier, is one of three related 2014 works (with the gallery piece Hidden Vistas and the installation Secret Horizons) that place sounds from distant places side by side, as if the listener could be in two places at once.

Going / Places grew from an incident on the London Underground almost 25 years earlier, when a lost visitor asked Harrison for directions while he was recording. Commissioned at the invitation of his former student Pierre Alexandre Tremblay as an hour-long piece for Harrison’s retirement, it premiered at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in November 2015. A Leverhulme fellowship paid for recording trips to Australia and Iceland. The booklet maps 23 scenes, opening and closing in Italy and passing through Marrakech, a glacier cave on Sólheimajökull, Sydney Harbour, the Bako rainforest in Borneo and airport announcements, including a homage to Bernard Parmegiani and his jingle for Paris Charles de Gaulle.

Born in Scunthorpe in 1952, Harrison studied at the University of York and worked on electroacoustic parts for the National Theatre in London. From 1980 he taught at the University of Birmingham, where he directed the studios and BEAST, and he is now Emeritus Professor.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 16139, 2016.