The Domestic Soundscape

Today when I switched on my computer I noticed that Google is using this image of a ewe and a lamb for Mothering Sunday.

This reminded me that last week on Lambing Live I learned that the Swaledale Sheep breed is renowned for the good maternal skills of its ewes. Swaledales, it turns out, are good mothers. I think this means that they do not lose their lambs easily, that they do a good job of protecting and guarding them, and that they produce plenty of milk. Young Swaledale lambs need this kind of protection, because they are often born in the exposed and high-lying environments of the North Yorkshire moors.

Having knit with pure Swaledale I can say that as a fibre, it reminds me very strongly of the places where the breed originated, and I think there are few yarns more suitable for the purpose of making hill-walking socks. Prick Your Finger’s DK Swaledale is from young sheep, so it is not as rough as it might be, but it retains a robust hardiness which I personally like in a good walking sock. Slim strands of kemp somehow prevent the socks from felting too much, creating resistance and strength in the fabric, which is perfect for the work of walking up steep hills where a sure and solid surface is necessary for the feet to work against. I also love the colour of the pure Swaledale; many shades of white inhabit the yarn so that it resembles stone or earth, with heathery, non-flat colours and a certain roughness that catches the light. In behaviour, Swaledale yarn is supple, slim and hardy – just like the sheep that it comes from. Knitting with the Swaledale yarn reminds me of crunchy snow and difficult landscapes.

There is a beautiful bit of footage in Andy Goldsworthy’s film River and Tides where one can see both the maternal power of the Swaledale, and the mountainous context which has produced this unique breed. Andy Goldsworthy is an artist from the North of England who works with natural materials – ice, snow, thorns, twigs, leaves etc. – to produce ephemeral works which exist briefly in the landscape before being consumed by the same elemental processes that produced them. Most of Goldsworthy’s work is impermanent, but he has thought a lot about sheep in his practice, because they have been so central in shaping the places where he has lived and worked, and in recent years has produced a work entitled ‘Enclosures’ in which he restored many permanent stone shelters, for sheep. There is an interesting review of the book detailing this project here – and when Mark and I visited the Lake District back in Autumn 2008, we saw some of the restored enclosures for ourselves.

In the DVD about Goldsworthy’s work – Rivers and Tides – there is an amazing moment where a Swaledale gives birth while Goldsworthy talks about sheep and what they mean to him. I especially liked the unsentimental approach that the video-directors took here; the birth is bloody and visceral, and the shepherd helps the mother to know her lamb by rubbing her face in it. There is no cosy barn or straw, just grey stones, white air, thin grass, and the mucky lamb being cleaned by its mother and trembling on its just-born legs. One can sense the brittle beauty and cold hardness of the landscape from the light.

The reason this landscape looks as it is – with no trees – is because of the sheep. So the sheep have had this very deep impact on the land… and so I do feel this need to work with the sheep and yet our perception of sheep is so different to the reality of the sheep. It makes it (an) incredibly difficult thing to work with because we perceive it as being ‘a woolly animal’ and to get through that woolliness to the essence of the sheep is very, very hard… sheep are incredibly powerful animals in their own way.

They have been responsible for social and political upheavals; the Highland Clearances when people where people were put off the land… the landlords put sheep on the land and moved the people away. And they’ve left their story behind them; it’s written in the place, in the landscape. There is an absence in the landscape because of the effects of sheep.

People lived, worked and died here and I can feel their presence in the places where I work. And I am the next layer upon those things that have happened already.

- Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides

So in the context of Mothering Sunday I am thinking a lot about the Swaledale Sheep, the awesome forces in the Earth itself, and the raw energy and blood that mothering – in my observations at least – really entails. It seems to me that mothering is a thing which, like the much cutefied sheep, is often depicted in sentimental and softening terms which defy its power and its strength. Like the soft Merino wool with all the kemp bred out of it, gentle mothering is more fashionable than the Swaledale school of love, which is robust and hearty and born of rocks and places where the wind is wild and free.

But I know which school of love I come from and I am grateful for the strength of that place. Merino socks wear through quickly, but the deep hearty powers of Swaledale take us up mountains and back down again. Hurrah for good mothers, for uncute sheep, for mountains and hills, and for strong socks that last the distance. Hurrah for love and sheep and Happy Mother’s Day, Bam.

Rough Fell, a horned sheep related somewhere back in sheep history to the Swaledale.

I really enjoyed reading Kate’s recent post on walking and how we build up imaginative representations of places as we patrol them. It made me think about my familiar routes, the places which I habitually visit, the things I note along the way, and how I remember places.

Pigeons in the snow in Palmer Park, February 2009

Pigeons in Palmer Park, March 2009

I make recordings on a regular basis – of everything from buying a pint of milk in my local shop to walking down the road – and what amazes me is how, in listening back to my many sound-recordings, (all with the equally unrecognisable filename of ‘R09_000##’) I am often able to identify where the recording was made, and when. Sound can describe the architecture and surface qualities of places in ways that are 3-dimensional and in ways that contain time, so that when I listen back to a 10-minute recording made of frying onions, the 10 minutes in which that happened are somehow preserved.

To me, sound is very physical, inscribing itself against the paper-thin membrane of my eardrums in a very tangible way, and conveying a constant stream of information about the material world in all its scratchy, flawed, repetitive glory. I am not aware of the physical sensation of seeing in the same way that I am aware of the physical sensation of hearing, and I find that in listening to banal reality I become intensely aware of the material world around me. Sound activates the surfaces around me, (how do soundwaves bounce between the surfaces?) and describes the size of any space, (how does sound resonate in that space?) and the more I work with sound, the more I appreciate and am inspired by the physical and detailed way that it describes textures as well as places… for instance, anyone who has ever fried an egg knows the specific tone of oil that is too hot for the task, or the disappointing non-sizzle that lukewarm oil produces on contact with your raw egg. With knitting, I find I am also interested in the extremely small differences in the sound of one yarn or another when I knit, and in the role that sound plays – as well as touch – in conveying its texture to me. In non-domestic situations, I find this obsession with material qualities extends to the built and natural environment outdoors, and I am interested in why sounds seem brittle when there is a lot of ice on the ground, or how the noise of traffic changes between wide, open roads and roads flanked by tall buildings.

The he(a)r(e) / deliberately listening to this tags I made, for exploring the relationship between place and listening

Followers of this blog may recall that I combined some of these ideas – listening and a sense of place – in the Swaledale Sea Socks that were inspired by a combination of the crispy sound of the Swaledale yarn, and my memory of the crunching sand near Romney Marshes. Since knitting these socks and getting hours and hours of pleasurable wear out of them, I have had a number of thoughts on the design.

1. I would prefer these socks if they were knit in such a way that both heel and toe could be picked up and knit down at the end, so that heel and toe are easy to replace
2. The double-thickness of the fabric (created by using 2 colours and having short floats on the back of the fabric) acts very much like the double layer of the 1000 mile socks that have given my feet such comfort on long distance walks
3. I very much like the mix of place/sound/materials that inspired the design

With these thoughts in mind, I dyed the remainder of my 100% Swaledale DK yarn from Prick Your Finger using the walnut hulls I found at St Mary’s Butts in Reading, with the intention of doing something related to that site itself, in knitting.

Here is the wool that I dyed, at the foot of the Walnut tree from which the dye came.

However, once I had wound the balls of yarn, I realised they look far less like the lovely tree and much more like the church that stands directly behind it!

I also noticed that the simple patterns I had employed in the original Swaledale Socks could be perfectly adapted to celebrate the iconic brickwork of the church – which is a landmark and a regular visual feature of my walks around Reading.

I am enjoying making my socks immensely and the visual/material/colourwork aspects of the project are highly satisfying in linking site, tree, materiality, place, colour and creative process in a useful pair of socks. However, the main sound associated with St Mary’s Butts is the sonorous, slightly chaotic bell-ringing that radiates from its handsome tower every Sunday morning at around 11am. In my habitual wanderings around Reading I have noticed this sound and been uplifted by its joyous insistence and by the many different tones of stone and metal and rope and human effort that combine in its fullsome ringing.

The church and the walnut tree, January 2010

The church, November 2009

I went to the church last Sunday to make recordings of the bell ringing and to think about how I could translate some elements of this sound into the design. I am not sure yet that I can, nor of what this might add to the usefulness of the socks. However I did make a radio feature for The Hub this week which brought the knitting ideas and the sound of the bells together, and I am enjoying the process of thinking about all the ideas in this territory… place, materiality, listening, sound, texture, site and movement. It’s a good journey, this one, into a broad and rich set of ideas.

And for those kinds of adventures, I like a good pair of socks.

The pattern will be available to buy from Prick Your Finger when I finish writing it up!

 

 radio feature on site-specific-socks: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is the first sock I have made in which sound was an influence, and I think it may well be my very favourite sock.

Last year when I was staying in Sussex, Kate and I took a walk on the beach and I found myself comparing the gorgeously light crunch of the seashells and sand underfoot with the delicious crispness of some Swaledale yarn I had acquired from Prick Your Finger. Excitedly listening to the amplified sound of shells and sand through my Edirol and thrusting my headphones upon poor Kate insisting that she too participate in the sonic rapture, I began wondering how this white, sandy yarn could be used – both visually and with its touch – to evoke my whole sense of that place.

Now I know that crispiness is not ordinarily a quality one desires in a yarn, but the distinctive, delicate, sheeply scrunch of my DK Swaledale from Prick Your Finger struck me as being special, and as soon as I heard/touched it, I set about trying to find a way of bringing out its excellent, tactile qualities. The texture of this yarn is very similar, I feel, to that of a sandy beach. The initial touch is soft and pleasurable, but on further handling you realise you are touching something elemental, strong and enduring. I believe this yarn is worsted spun as it is heavier and smoother than one would expect from the wool of one of the country’s hardiest sheep breeds, and the exacting way it has been spun by at Diamond Fibres has lent the yarn a strength and density that make it ideal for walking wear. The more I walk in my woollen socks, the more I desire the sense of sturdy fibres underfoot and the more I want a firm fabric that – while cushioning my feet against the inside of my boots – will not be worn through after a few wearings.

At first I experimented with recreating the textures of the beach at Dymchurch using stitch-patterns.

…but I was unsatisfied with the resulting fabric, and how it somehow made this fine, straight yarn appear thin and curly, and how it failed to showcase the delicious variations of creams and whites within the fibres. After buying some blue Organic Cornish Wool to make the lettering inside Mark’s sweater, I realised that perhaps the best way to emphasise these creams and whites, was through contrast.

This photo doesn’t quite do justice to the incredibly rich blue of the Organic Cornish Wool placed beside the Swaledale, but hopefully you can see the wonderful hairiness of the Swaledale beside this much darker shade, and how the semi-solid blues echo the mix of whites that comprise the Swaledale. I adore these yarns together, and with the floats on the back, the resultant fabric is incredibly warm and strong.

To inform my design, I read Priscilla A. Gibson-Roberts’ book, Simple Socks; Plain and Fancy, which offers several ideas and forumlas for designing socks using short-rows at both heels and toes. This method allows for heels and toes to be replaced with greater ease than in other methods of construction, and this – along with the sturdy fabric created by two-handed colourwork – seems an infinitely practical choice for the development of a hard-wearing sock, for walking.

Because this sock reminds me of a crunchy beach walk with Kate and because I now associate the i-cord bind-off entirely with her, I decided to finish my sock off like this.

I love it and can’t wait to finish the second sock, so that I may thrust my feet inside my boots and go off in search of further sonic inspiration…

Sock #1 ravelled here.

 

 crunchy sand and shells underfoot: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Thanks so much everyone for your help in identifying the mystery bird from my last post! I think you are all right and the sound I heard was a Great Tit singing. The first few files that I found through google relating to the birdsong of Great Tits didn’t sound at all like what I heard. But this page from the BBC had a recording of a Great Tit with the same characteristic ‘tea-cher, tea-cher, tea-cher’ phrasing as on my recording, plus some information about the wide range of songs employed by the Great Tit male bird in his defence of territory. One theory is that they sing many different songs at the various corners of their patch in order to confuse other birds and make them think that many different birds live there. Today the birdsong I heard mostly belongs to pheasants.

view across the fields near Stoke Talmage

We went out walking in Oxfordshire in search of the enticingly titled ‘lost village’ of Standhill. Wiped out by the plague in the 1400s, this small village has been reduced to a few stones and a great stand of conifers in a field. As we walked, I was so entranced by the sounds encountered along the way that I went slightly insane and recorded 67 different files to the beloved Edirol that I use. That will take some editing.

Mark’s boys were delighted at the ice and if I’m honest, the sonic potential of this marvellous substance was in part the fuel for my recording frenzy. We had crisp, fully frosted grass to walk upon, puddles iced over to crack and sploosh in, and the incredible game of throwing stones onto a large and totally frozen over pond. We stood for quite a while flinging rocks and listening to the skippy, echoey sounds produced as they bounced across the pond’s glassy surface. I’ve attached some sounds at the bottom of this post as I am really interested in the role that sound played in our encounter with the landscape today. From the giddy joy of the boys at smashing icy puddles to my delight at the almost mystical harmonics produced by stones skimming over ice, our contact with our walk was largely shaped by sound.

I am not the first field-recordist to get excited by the sounds of Ice; Peter Cusack’s recording of the Baikal Lake melting is a fascinating project featuring lots and lots of melting and cracking ice etc. I certainly captured nothing of such epic dimensions today but I do think that ice has some amazing sonic qualities.

Frosted Oak Leaf

I also found myself thinking a lot about knitting while I was walking today. Sound puts me entirely in mind of the physical and tactile qualities of an environment in ways that even the most visceral image can’t. Soundwaves bounce between surfaces in ways which mean that distance, size, space, and surface quality are all described by it. An image can be cropped to edit or omit visual elements, but when you take a recorder out into a field there is no way of cropping the sounds that you will capture with it… no edge of frame beyond the borders between which the soundwaves themselves move.

Take, for instance, the crisp sound produced by walking on frozen grass. Does it not have a certain substantive or material quality about it? Does the sound not suggest iciness, a brittleness of substance and a glassy fragility beyond that alluded to in any image of the same? To me the sound of walking on frosty grass is full of rich, tactile information. The recording literally evokes coldness in my toes and fingers and the sense of walking on compounded, frozen mud.

This very physical quality of sound is remeniscent to me of how certain yarns can evoke a sense of place through their tactile qualities. Take for instance the yarn of the Rough Fell Sheep that Prick Your Finger used for the development of their super sign and which I used to create a scrubber/potholder. Prick Your Finger’s Handspun Rough Fell yarn has quite a relaxed twist in it and is pleasingly crunchy. I wouldn’t want to make pants with it but for outer garments or household knits, it produces a very structured fabric. I like the way it is scratchy and the way it reminds me of walking on rough terrain, because in this way it retains a tactile connection to the ‘Rough Fells’ that it comes from and it is full of rich imaginings and haptic associations absent from a luxurious but anonymously produced ball of cashmere. It seems I am not the only person to perceive this exciting link between the Rough Fell Sheep and its habitat; To quote from the fell sheep website:

Over the past few years Rough Fell breeders have increasingly recognised the special feature of their sheep: namely its connection with the distinctive landscape and culture of their area. A video, “Rough Fell Heritage”, celebrates the life, work and landscape of the Rough Fell sheep farming community.

Obviously I do not want to confuse or blur too much the regional specifics of Oxfordshire and the Lake District or to make totally crass observations (the wool goes crunch, the frosty grass goes crunch: how about that?) but I do enjoy the relationships between memory, touch and landscapes that can be perceived, and I am interested in teasing these half-formed ideas out into some kind of designing philosophy for myself.

I have been recently trying out a design which uses the tactile qualities of Swaledale with some of my ideas about a certain landscape. As with the frost and the Rough Fell, this design is largely sound-based. I cannot say too much here because this endeavour is part of a still-quiet project, but let us say that my experiments were foiled so far by the lack of a chart (lazy I know) and an inability to count stitches.

Unsatisfying Swaledale thing

I wanted to let you know that in among all the listening and photographing and thinking and writing and sound-diarying, there has still been knitting happening. And sunsets. And sleeping. And stuff.

 

 walking on frosty grass: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 ice cracking: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 stones game: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 startled pheasant: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download