Estuary 1
2022

Estuary 1 is an imaginative response to the coast along the Steart Peninsular, part of an estuary forming the Bristol Channel. The estuary has the second highest tidal range in the world and for large parts of the day at low tide, the sea disappears entirely, leaving brooding and treacherous quicksand and mudflats.
The piece moves through a series of sonic ‘scenes’ beginning at low tide and moving through evocations of a foreshore of reeds, marshland and small birds to a beach at high tide, before ending with a return to low tide at sunset. Despite this apparently linear structure, the piece explores what Olivier Laurent has called a ‘heterogeneous and multi-temporal present’, juxtaposing different timeframes within the same compositional space/place.

The low tide sections evoke environment experienced as mythical time full of sinister animistic forces and the voices of the perished while the world of the foreshore and high tide is composed using recordings of environmental sounds which have persisted for hundreds of thousands of years. Even this ‘realistic’ and seemingly ahistorical timeframe is disrupted by the sound of a car, but is the walker on the beach the driver or some other human who walked these desolate shores in times past?