Far Gone And Out

Far Gone And Out was commissioned for “Grain – an exploration of contemporary landscape using sound” curated by Ben Eastop, Tim Eastop and Andrew Dodds. The work continues the psychological experiments initiated by Forsyth & Pollard with Silent Sound, with Forsyth & Pollard seeking to tap into the latent energy of the performance space at Grain – an abandoned holding space between someplace and no-place.

The resulting piece is a sonic limbo, bringing together recordings of each of the artists undergoing a session of Past Life Regression with clinical hypnotist Barry Cooper. Split across the left and right channels of the stereo mix, these fragments of subconscious narrative are entwined with a musical composition by The Late Cord, a collaboration between musicians John Mark Lapham and Micah P Hinson. The result is a beautifully compelling state of otherness.

The work was first presented as a live broadcast on 22 September 2007, alongside several other audio works, on the Isle of Grain in Kent. With only one road in and out, through an eerie mix of post-industrial brownfield space, abandoned wartime architecture and nearby natural Sites of Special Scientific Interest, the Isle of Grain is one of the most remote locations in South East England – the final stop at the end of a long peninsula, a former island and a place to which few visitors venture. The works were presented in a number of arrangements and directed vistas, the assembled elements forming a kind of ‘performance’. Broadcast as dusk turns to night, atmospheric fluctuations in the environment itself became the catalyst for the sound works taking on altered forms. The event took a critical look at how these liminal places come to be defined by society, reflecting on the intricate relationships between the built environment and the ‘natural’, and the historical and contemporary influences, that have shaped large areas of this otherwise uncelebrated landscape.

Listen to the piece here: