Highly strung
Rob Law creates all the original music we use in End Game. Enter his music studio full of strings, meet some of the instrumental voices you’ll hear in this soundwork, and explore the liner notes tracing thematic links between music and climate change
Rob’s notes:
I’ve been playing music for a long time, and also working on climate change for a long time. It only occurred to me recently how much the music I was making was reflecting the loss, grief, anxiety and hope that I was experiencing from thinking about a climate changed future.
Recognition
Shortlisted nomination for the HearSay International Audio Festival “Create” category Audio Prize
We each come to understand the world in different ways and are shaped by what we love and what we surround ourselves with. For me one of those things is music and musical instruments. At last count I think I had 35 different stringed instruments plus all manner of other instruments surrounding my walls and my floors. When you spend that long with things you start to see a part of yourself in them and they start to form part of that fragile thing we call an identity. Music has so many mysterious and yet exciting ideas to offer about how we are in the world and things that may be happening around us that are not so overt to our conscious mind.
In this piece I wanted to explore a few ideas that relate (somewhat tenuously) back to the idea of living through a time of big change, and also how we relate to people and place. It’s this idea that we are all ‘responding to our environment’ all the time in ways we are not fully aware of, and in a way we are all getting retuned, and like the instrument strings trying to find our new pattern and our ‘sympathetic resonance’.
“Sympathetic resonance or sympathetic vibration is a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness.” – Wikipedia
This idea that we might all be responding to each other and retuning ourselves in subtle ways to big environmental changes underway.
Credits
co-Produced by Rob Law & Kyla Brettle
Sound and Music by Rob Law
Photography by Carmen Bunting
License
CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike)
Use the contact form if you wish to request a downloadable copy
Distribution
Feb 16, 2021 ‘Highly Strung’ on HearSay with Suzanne Donnisthrope on MAINfm (includes Suzanne’s interview with Rob)
Feb 12, 2021 “The beauty of ‘End Game’ | Kyla Brettle and Rob Law” on Art Breaker with Mark Spencer on The Climactic Collective (includes Mark’s interview with Kyla and Rob)
Links
Rob Law’s Muisc
Carmen Bunting Photography
Kyla Brettle’s Blog