Unearthings

A summer's day in deepest darkest East Anglia, and a record of the changing physical and sonic landscapes of the countryside. It's an area of ghost airfields, buried history, and vast wide open fields under a vast wide open sky. Transcription of larksong by Professor Walter Garstang. Voices - Mr. William Aldred, an 80 year-old farmhand, recorded in 1936 Professor H. C. Wyld (reading an extract fro...

It was a Sunday in mid-May. We were in Suffolk, listening to a cuckoo in a wood near a nuclear power station, and the time seemed to stand still. On our way home, we stopped by a patch of heathland, and were serenaded for more than an hour by a pair of nightingales, who were drowning out the sound of the military aircraft that were rumbling overhead. It was a clear evening. There was a sundog befo...

A celebration of allotments, the patron saint, birds of the air and the bard, along with the arrival of spring. The words in the cuckoo section are taken from Our Bird Friends by R. Kearton (1900).

The music is the landscape, and the landscape is the music, and we’re all tied to it by our shared history... Unearthings is a series of transmissions inspired by the changing seasons and changing landscape of East Anglia, drawing on poetry, prose, found texts and field recordings.