THE SPONTANEOUS FLAX ENSEMBLE

Craig Stewart Johnson, Grace Jackson, Liza Prins

As an experimental noise session, this ‘work’ brings together Craig Stewart Johnson’s interest in the ‘sounds in between’, Liza Prins’s interest in the sounds of (pre-industrial) flax processing and Grace Jackson’s spinning skills. The session builds on the raw sounds of live processing of flax (rippling, heckling, scutching and spinning), pre-recorded/composed material from the flax field on tapes, and pre-recorded ethnographic/archival material of spinning songs. Parallel to the flax, the sounds have been reworked, layered, synthesised, and reformulated in an improvised manner. Rhythms and fragments of recordings come in to gradually build a more complex, spatiotemporal soundscape.

Originally broadcast on WORM 25 hour radio relay, 25th January 2025

https://worm.org/production/25-hour-radio-relay/