Houses of Sound: Location sound as musical material, cultural resource and holder of memories

Musician and sound artist Iain Chambers explores how sound can capture changing environments and tell histories. Iain Chambers is a musician and sound artist whose work draws on location recordings, treating found environmental sounds as musical material. Between 2015-19 he created concerts inside the cavernous Bascule Chamber of Tower Bridge, using its brick-lined acoustic to premiere new music performed beneath the Thames. Since 2019, Iain's record label Persistence of Sound has released field recordings, electroacoustic music, and the uncategorisable sounds in between, including by The London Sound Survey, the late field recordist and archivist Ian Rawes’s deep dive into the changing sound of the capital. In his talk for Lewisham Heritage, Iain will explore how location recordings can preserve spaces and places as they change, ranging from the infamous ‘Get Carter Carpark’ of Gateshead; the series of alternative concrete utopias Paris built post WWII; through to the forlorn landscape of Orford Ness. Iain will talk about Ian Rawes’s work, the projects they worked on together, and how sound archives directly feed into his music.