These Woods by Steven Ball
These Woods consists of the 'sound bed' of the soundtrack made for the 2024 film 'A Patriot of These Woods' by Karel Doing.
It is based around recordings made in Wistman's Wood on Dartmoor in Devon, macro sounds of the moss and oak of the ancient rainforest, the remnants of the wildwood mosaic of trees which extended along the western landmasses of what is now known as the British Isles. The recordings are granularised and synthesised with the sound of human voice into a flow of reconstructed sonic material.
These Woods presents the woodland landscape in macroscape as undifferentiatable experience, foregrounding the interconnectedness of perception in a dynamic field. There is no background, the foreground goes ever backwards, both the trees and the woods. We merge with the landscape, we become the field, intersecting with plants, mosses, lichen, lungwort, exchanging chemical signals.
Steven Ball has been working as an artist since the early 1980s, in film, video, sound, installation, and performance, and has been a member of the post-punk DIY group Storm Bugs. In 2014 he started writing and recording songs as a solo project, being particularly concerned with experimenting with which kinds of texts might constitute a song lyric.