A different language is a different reality; what is the language, the world, of stones? What is the language, the world, of birds? Of atoms? Of microbes? Of air?

– Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects

The images, interviews and sound clips that I collect will sound foreign; it’s noisy here, it’s big, and I think truly fascinating, but it is really quite different from the UK. The problem is that my mundane is exotic to a UK audience; the quantities, the colours, the voices.

– Claudia Figueiredo, Mundane Appreciation, corresponding about the Fantastical Reality Radio Show

I don’t know how you experience foreign landscapes, but I experience different places mostly in terms of new textures. For starters, the language spoken in a country foreign to me is a sonic texture that differs enormously from what I know, from what is familiar. We had to talk about this during the Fantastical Reality Radio Show because of the way that Mexico – where Claudia lives – is so different in its sonic ‘feeling’ to England. Shaping my mouth to make new sounds puts the taste of a new place into my mouth in a way that even the food cannot. The soundscape aside, the Earth smells different depending on where you are on it.

My sense of place is comprised mostly of sensory details. The landscape and the way history has shaped it are as evident in tiny areas as in sweeping overviews.

Crumbling painted plaster at Pompeii

I am often overwhelmed by vast panoramic views of entirely foreign landscapes, and so tend to break these up into small and manageable areas of focus. I love how looking at a small area of detail can help me to understand how the place I am visiting differs from my homeground. When I am away from England, I notice things like the way the bricks are laid, the textures formed on the soil or in the rock and what I will mostly notice and photograph, are surfaces that I haven’t seen before.

The inside of the crater at Vesuvius, still an active volcano

I wonder how much this sensual preoccupation with places has something to do with being a knitter and a sound-recordist? It is certainly difficult for me to go anywhere without imagining how the things I see could be translated into stitch patterns.

Roman brickwork at the Amphitheatre at Pozzuoli

And when I listen back to recordings I have made, I am always struck by how the surfaces and the sounds of the spaces where the recordings were made are faithfully preserved by the sounds within the recording. I didn’t manage to do a whole lot of recording while I was in Italy, but I did record the toaster in the breakfast buffet bar and I did record the the hiss of steam rising out of a very sulphurous hole in the ground at Solfatara.

Solfatara, Pozzuoli, Italy

The lovely Caroline wrote me a beautiful letter about sound – which was definitely in one of the scripts I wrote for the show, if not in the final version of that show – which I’ll quote here as it really sums up for me what sound recordings of place are like, in terms of their ability to document and evoke.

It was also nice to get out the minidisk and go through some old recordings…of buskers on a tram, priests in St Peter’s in Rome singing, kids in the warehouse singing ABC all wrong, accordion tunes with someone cooking dinner in the background, morrocan musicians at a party, someone snoring through the same party, a dog panting, me whistling mac the knife while clearing up the kitchen… it’s all so evocative, brings me right back to where each one was made. I can see in my mind the light in the square in Rome in the evening, from hearing a tree full of birds five or six years later. They all mean something to me, but not much to anyone else. It’s like an audio diary. Beautiful.-Caroline, artist, recordist, beloved friend

So the sounds of a place are almost like a texture, for me. This is an idea I will be exploring further in my PhD this year… the materiality of sound or the way that I think of sound as being like a fabric that you can collect and use to make something else.

Then there is the way that knitting encourages a tactile relationship with places.

The way that, when you look at the lush forests covering fertile volcanic rock, you see a green sweater or a skein of dyed yarn in deep greys and verdant, leafy shades.

The lush green forests covering the sides of Vesuvius

Or the curious way that you instantly interpret the ‘Roman’ qualities of a broken column as a texture, rather than as a structural shape.

…there were so many different textures in Napoli.

Hot, urban textures… a patina of graffiti overlaying modern brickwork…

Graffiti on the walls at Pozzuoli train station

…so different from the ancient, painted surfaces of ochre and umber, preserved under volcanic ash for so long out at Pompeii…

…or the naked, Roman bricks on the walls of the Amphitheatre at Pozzuoli.

Different again, were the bricks built up around the rising steam at Solfatara, for Sauna or health-giving purposes. Look at the way the hot, volcano-heated water rising out of the earth has coated these bricks in Sulphur crystals:

The purpose-built sauna space at Solfatara

The heat in Napoli was one of the main differences, for me, between here and there. I am not used (or suited!) to so much sun. A landscape shaped by volcanic activity and full of thermal baths and spas is very exotic to me, though. I was especially excited by all the volcanic surfaces of Solfatara and Vesuvius…

Sulphur crystals at Sulfatara

Arid growth on the white, sandy slopes inside the volcanic crater at Sulfatara

Rocky surfaces and layers of strata inside the crater at Vesuvius

Burned on my mind after the trip are impressions of heat and dazzling sunlight. We stayed in a corner of the earth that is vibrantly yellow, ochre, white, green, grey and earthy in its colours – and in its foods.

Dried edibles in Ischia

Luckily, relief from some of the more scorching surfaces and temperatures was provided by the beautiful lemons and the soft blue waters of the Ocean.

Lemon-tastic porcelain on the Island of Ischia

Boats at the bay of Ischia

Locations, dates, facts and panoramic views to come…