Arriving at The Whitworth Art Gallery on Wednesday afternoon was a slightly overwhelming experience. In the context of the journey we have undertaken to get here – detailed in the previous 31 posts – this feeling was, in a sense, an entirely appropriate one. On seeing ‘the box’ for the first time, I thought how securely it inhabited the gallery space, how the colour chosen for its external walls allowed it to enter into a compelling relationship both with the earth that is the predominant colour of the farm and the varnished wooden slats that grid the mezzanine’s ceiling. 

Looking closely at the representation of Kaori-san’s graphic illustration for Air Pressure there was a strong dynamic between the smooth solidity of the typographic background and the rougher, more visibly human, rendering of the jet and vegetables. 

This dynamic extended a quality that was already latent in the original illustration – which was actually created entirely digitally, with the apparent shifts in brush size and brush pressure being technical artefacts achieved through software manipulation – but the overall register has been transferred slightly to find the vegetable, animal and human life of the farm occupying the same pictorial plane as the aircraft. That the real brush strokes that the visitors will see on the box were created by our collaborator Professor Hiramatsu only amplifies the aptness of this impression. 

David Morris and Luke Lovelock at the Whitworth had worked hard to light the installation. The box appears to glow out of a graded penumbra that sinks about its edges, with soft spotlights and recessed bulbs illuminating specific features, such as Kaori-san’s graphic, the interpretative panels and the entrance with its ‘noren’ curtain. I think that the result more than rewards those efforts since the installation now radiates the impression of something resolved out of the murk, of shadows shifting into shapes.

 

Yet the exterior lighting manages also to avoid an easy equation of light with illumination or, conversely, darkness with obscurity. That such formulae of ‘enlightenment’ are eschewed, works not just because as a result certain conceptual pitfalls can be safely navigated but, more practically, because once through the antechamber held between the noren and a sheet of blackout curtain, the audience finds darkness once more in the interior. Darkness not just in the intervals between projected sequences – which, like in the first soundfilm, are deployed as points of narrative inhalation and exhalation, of breath caught as things change – but also darkness in the materials of the installation (the black carpets, the black walls) and darkness in some of what is seen on screen.

 

Over the years I have built up a protective resistance against the slightest suggestion of any infectious delight in my creative endeavours. But sitting in the Air Pressure installation, as all the cables and intricate boxes that might otherwise intrude retreat their way into invisibility and inaudibility and I am left with only the immersive sensation of the sounds and the images and their interplay, even I have to admit that there might well be something quite special here. In the movements between darkness and colour, between sound and silence, any perceived faults with the work recede and what is left, for me at least, is a feeling of this collaborative enterprise itself – from Rupert, Professor Hiramatsu and myself, through Kaori-san, Asako-san and Hayashi-san and on to those here at the Whitworth who have committed their imagination and expertise. A feeling that this collective effort by all those involved might actually measure up to the inspiration of the farmers far away in what remains of Toho hamlet, right there in the centre of Narita International Airport.

 

 

Since we started working on Air Pressure – and Rupert reminded me tonight that our very first exchanges began with emails that he had sent from an internet café in Rabat, Morocco - we had in mind a box. A box in a gallery that would somehow contain the experience of living in the farm in Toho that was almost engulfed by the vast expanse of the airport and, most importantly, by its noise. This notion of a box has retained its currency throughout the 18 months we have devoted to the project – we thought of it before I had even been to the site and we thought of it while we were standing next to each other looking south out of the upper window of the Egg House. We proposed it to our eventual funders the Wellcome Trust and we offered it as an idea for an installation to the Whitworth Gallery.

The box has been through many iterations. At first, I was keen to appropriate an actual farm building and import it back to the UK. As this aspiration became impractical, we thought of how the exterior of the box might nonetheless allude to the textures of the weathered but maintained materials that distinguish the Shimamura’s farm buildings or, at the very least, to the shapes of their structures. As we began to realise that the box’s contents were themselves becoming richer and more intricate, the opposite inclination emerged – to reduce and simplify the box towards more manageable proportions and a more neutral disposition.

As spring swung toward summer and as summer shortened into autumn, decisions about the box’s scale and decisions about the box’s character became the concrete stuff of commissioning designers and builders, choosing colours and dimensions, access and egress, screen size and speaker placement. Graham at The Workhaus became responsible for managing the translation of our ideas into something that could simultaneously exist harmoniously with the gallery space itself, could accommodate the visitors’ bodies in some kind of comfort and could provide a platform for the projectors, screens, speakers, amps and cables that we needed to deliver the audio-visual dimension but which we wanted to be as invisible as possible. Sarah and Alex at ADi negotiated the best technical answers to our aesthetic and conceptual questions and Luke at the Whitworth was the one who helped us to properly understand the available parameters – providing, by way of example, a 3D model of the proposed space that suddenly snapped into focus what had remained – to us – blurry in the 2D plans.

At one point we described the box as a “stress laboratory”, an architectural opportunity for a vicarious insight into the Shimamuras’ daily lives. For reasons I have discussed in earlier posts, the installation cannot quite be that. The box cannot fully embrace that ambition because, primarily, it can only house a temporary slice of a lived experience that extends beyond the days and weeks into the years and decades. Nevertheless, in working with each other, with The Workhaus and ADi, and with the Whitworth Gallery, we have tried to enable the box to deliver as much of what we feel is the sensory reality of the island farm as possible.

 

For me, the two periods of fieldwork – during the harvest season of 2010 and the sowing cycle of 2011 - have been by far the most emotionally intense time on the Air Pressure project. That said, the heaviness of those experiences was lightened by the warm relations that sprung up between Rupert and myself and between us and Hayashi-san, Matsui-san and Professor Hiramatsu. The farming family, too, further reduced the weightiness of any burden by their good humour and generosity towards us (and, for want of sounding patronising, by their example of a dignified solidarity in the face of great odds).

In the UK, we have been working on the material we gathered in the fields around Toho. We produced what we now colloquially refer to as “The Soundfilm”, which was shown at the Documentary Now! conference at Westminster University and again at the Phonography Colloquium at Goldsmiths, at which Rupert, Professor Hiramatsu and myself also spoke. The film was additionally exhibited in the Special Interest category at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Ethnographic Film Festival. I presented a paper – a keynote address – about our work at the Rhythm and Event symposium that was held at King’s College on October 29^th, focusing upon those aspects of the site and our representation of it that I thought most clearly resonated with the themes of the day.

Later in May, we were invited to submit a track for The Wire’s cover CD compilation. As someone who has been reading that magazine for a long while – since the August 1985 issue with Sonny Rollins peering over his spectacles, in fact - getting the track accepted and, finally, bending to pick up the finished article from among the pizza delivery flyers and bills on my doorstep was a grand moment.

At the moment, the focus is the forthcoming exhibition, but we are also working on a CD release with Gruenrekorder. The designers at Flatlab have taken responsibility for the booklet that accompanies the CD and this is currently looking very exciting indeed. With the CD, we have composed 10 tracks that present different scenes from the farm. These have, metaphorically speaking had to be put on the shelf for a while as the exhibition has taken precedence and priority, but we will be finishing these off over the next winter month, before they are sent for mastering.

One of the things this whole elaborate process has taught us is the extent to which this project and its complexities lend themselves to this multi-faceted approach, where different emphases can be explored through different vehicles and where it is only through an engagement with the whole that the fullest picture can emerge.

Another thing that has been important has been an acceptance of the extent to which the truths of our exploration of the farm site in Narita can only emerge through a reflexive process of doing. In less stilted terms: hard-drives full of sound and video material, diaries and sketch-books, inchoate ideas, memories of the people we met and the place we lived in, all of these, can only really have their potential realised through some practical operation that depends for its success on the gamble of an initial creative hazard (composing, writing, editing) that once hesitantly ventured is then developed amongst ourselves through a process of reflection, discussion and adaptation.

I have just uploaded this single screen film in a smaller frame size to Vimeo and you can look at the work here.

 

A little behind the Egg House on the Toho farm there is a truck that is no longer used by the farming family. Painted directly on to one blue metal side is a series of words – in Japanese script and in roman characters – and figurative images of people, vegetables and eggs all arranged around a white space with sparse ‘action lines’ suggesting release of energy. The vegetables are depicted as outlandishly large, dwarfing the human forms with whom they share the side of the truck. But despite their proportional size, the carrots, aubergines, green peppers, peas and turnips project a convivial welcome, a friendliness that I think is characteristic of work of the artist responsible, Kaori Inomata. Kaori-san, it turns out, is the daughter of one of the farm’s customers and also illustrated Shimamura-san’s book, “To Live With The Earth”. You can see more of Kaori's work in the composite image that accompanies the "Breathing Slow, Breathing Fast" blog entry below.

We met Kaori in the bland reverberant lobby of the Toyoko Inn Hotel where we were staying during our second period of fieldwork. Rupert and I had been thinking about how we could bring more of the Shimamura’s sense of aesthetics into our project as a counter-weight to our own sensibilities. We were after something different from what had already been done in terms of presenting the farmers with sketches of our work in progress (showing them video footage and audio recordings on the first trip and showing them the edited first sound film on our return) and then trying hard to incorporate their ideas. Since the farmers had chosen Kaori-san to provide images that represented the farm – on the truck and in the book – we wondered if this might be a possible route down which to travel.

We showed Kaori-san the first sound film and talked more broadly of our ambitions before focusing specifically on what we were considering for the installation at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester and for the CD-booklet. Over the coming weeks and months, Kaori developed different series of images, with one sequence in particular holding our attention. She worked further on this sequence, making different versions in different colours and with different weights attached to its various contributing textual and visual devices. I’ve included some lower resolution images of two of the alternatives here.

We realised that it might work very well to include a large scale version of one of Kaori’s images directly onto the side of the constructed box designed to house the “Air Pressure” installation in the Upper Mezzanine Gallery. We had other plans, too, of flags outside the Gallery reminiscent of the flags that flutter outside restaurants and shops in Japanese streets and of the ‘noren’ curtains that are used to decorate entrance spaces. The idea of the flags was ultimately abandoned but Kaori-san did produce an image that would complement a noren and she supervised its manufacture. I’ve included the graphic design that forms the basis of the noren here. The Japanese script reads ‘kiatsu’ or ‘sound pressure’ and we have borrowed this title for the second, two-screen film Rupert and I have made together.

I find Kaori’s illustrations compelling: they exude a certain ‘tactility’ that prevents them from being flat, despite the evident lightness of line, shape and colour. Yet there is also something more enduring and substantial about them that should really complement the very different tones and palettes Rupert and I are working with. 

We spent time visiting some of the sound pressure level devices which follow the principal paths of the planes from the sky to the ground. Hoisted up on hollow metal poles and normally encased in a weather-proofed foam housing, there are 102 of these monitoring systems distributed around Narita. Cables from the devices attached to the poles snake downwards into a metal shed (or convenient building) containing a display monitor, computer processors and power. Venturing into the shed is to be confronted by the steady hum of circuitry doing its work. Apparently, the 102 monitoring devices compare to 7 located in the vicinity of Heathrow. According to Hayashi-san, the monitors belong to three different organisations, Narita City, the Narita Airport Authority and a private monitoring company. Each system is different in its operation. The NAA system, for example, uses a transponder-based mechanism which only activates in response to the detection of an incoming aircraft. As I understand it, other systems use the onset of sound above a particular amplitude to activate the system while still others, like the system Matsui installed around the farm, register perpetual variations of sound.

Professor Hiramatsu garnered us a meeting with one of the companies that manufactures and installs some of the monitoring equipment, Niitobo. They brought a sophisticated piece of measuring apparatus called NoiseVision to the farm. This device, resembling something from the set of a science-fiction film, takes the form of a basket-ball-sized black sphere, intended with microphones that simultaneously register 360-degrees of sound from its 32 individual sensors. The ball, mounted on a dedicated tripod, feeds its data down thick cables to a large blue metal box which, in its turn, uses a conventional laptop to monitor its progress. The system has a number of uses. It is employed in engineering settings to detect noise leakages in, for example, vehicles. It has also been used in domestic homes to analyse sound-proofing. This was the first time it had been deployed in an outdoor setting and, of course, in such close proximity to unshielded noise. The system was set-up in the ‘haka’, the bamboo grove where the graves of the protestors are placed (where we once saw a sombre official from the Narita Airport Authority placing fresh flowers and the ritual offerings of cans of tea and bottles of water). To see such a hi-tech arrangement encountering the walls of bamboo that surround the graves with their long wooden stakes bearing the name of the dead, was truly bizarre.

One of the things that makes the NoiseVision system different is suggested by its name. Rather than just spit out arrays of numerical data, the calibrated instrument also produces a video image of the noise. This takes the form of an output in someways similar to thermal imaging: a background out of which gradations of foreground appear, with different colours representing different intensities. The device doesn't just narrow down to one perspectival frame but draws in the whole surrounding scene simultaneoulsy. The company have agreed to donate the ‘footage’ captured in the grove to Rupert and I for use in the installation. Once we've resolved how to turn what amounts to a surround film into something that fits on a linear timeline, we can see great potential for this. For one thing, obviously, it provides a graphic account of the movement of sound in space. For another, it is a nice visual short-hand for the different systems of measuring sound that have grown up around issues of noise. Finally, it makes an interesting parallel both to our re-projection of sequences of protest documentaries onto the walls of the bamboo grove and makes an oblique reference to the video mixer that features in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. This is Golden Week in Japan, a long national holiday, but once that is over, and once the computers have done their processing work, we should be getting a sequence from Niitobo to use in the film element in the exhibition. Of course, the potential for this product in the real world health situations of those exposed to unwanted sound is of considerably greater worth since it provides a legible representation of what, as pure numbers and rival metrics, might seem arcane. Still, for us, there might be a rather special fix here for our creative needs.

This will be my last post for a while with my Japan internet connection coming to an end. I cannot wait to see my wife, my children and my friends. It feels like this has been a long stretch. We may not have undergone the immersive intensity of living on the farm this time but we have been rewarded with something different: a chance to contextualise our work in broader frames and, by talking about what we have done so far and showing the results, we have also ourselves been contextualised, especially in what Shimamura-san and Fujiko-san had to say about our efforts. Although I was frequently the butt of his jokes and although more than one delicate recording was marred by him wandering close and firing off a few photographs, I will miss Hayashi-san, without whom we would never have had the opportunity to work on the farm, nor draw upon the broader noise-health picture, nor eat so very well, nor be kept in such vibrant spirits, nor (frankly) have avoided arrest.

We have had a unique experience on the fieldwork element of this Wellcome Trust-funded project and I feel genuinely inspired by how the farmers have chosen to live their lives. That inspiration will be something that stays close to me for a long time. In more practical terms, what happens now, I guess, involves turning that inspiration (and its implications) into something conveyed in a gallery setting.
When I get the chance, I’ll continue to posting about our progress here. Thanks to everyone who has emailed about this blog over this last eight months. Your encouragement has been a strength and your criticisms invaluable (well … maybe not all your criticisms).

As we drove into the farm for the very last time this evening, dusk just beginning to fall, we startled the cock pheasant out of the long grass. To have finally witnessed, in a flash of proud iridescence, this bird that we had heard so often but never managed to see, felt an auspicious omen.

pictures courtesy Hayashi-san

What have we been recording? The answer should be easy enough. There is the farm and the farmers. Tabi shoes that press into soft earth, the green squeak of onion stalks as they are gathered in armfuls before being planted, the snipping of secateurs, the crisp rustle of broccoli leaves laden with drops of last night’s rain, the raucous report of the tractor as its motor coughs into its first combustion cycle, the wheel-barrow’s bright aluminium trundle, digging and tilling, the loosening and straightening of polyurethane in the breeze, the rattle of grain for the chickens and the dripping of the water that they drink, the pigs snorting and squealing and jostling, voices caught on the wind. There are the birds that have become familiar, the cock pheasant who barks but is never seen, the bush warbler’s electronic signature, the crows who pull their black wings across the fields, the swallows whose short chipping call finds the perfect acoustic analogue to their visual jinking in and out of sight, the finches that fizz in the brake of pine trees, each held up by wooden stakes. And then there are the skylarks that spiral into rising song that Shimamura-san had told us about last year when we had misunderstood him to be relating a memory of a now disappeared sound source. Now that there are at least five birds that I can hear launching themselves invisibly towards the heights, I feel a little daft having recorded a skylark out on the South Downs to punctuate a section of the film with secret meaning. At the moment, the insects that figured so prominently in our auditory consciousness last year, are too early in their reproductive cycle to contribute much to the soundscape but as the grasses get longer and the bamboo grows and gets greener, they will make themselves heard.

There is the airport. The unrelenting clamour of taxiing jets, the clanking, revving, beeping and droning of the various vehicles that load and unload, patrol and ferry, the artificial thunder of a big jet coming down, the straining energies released by one thrusting itself away from gravity.

All this is made available when the lens cap is taken off and when the microphone cable is clicked into place. Rupert’s filming continues to find the remarkable angles and frames. My recordings, once worked on at home, cleaned up and composed, will do their job. But there are dimensions that elude capture, like the sense of solidarity – and, in fact, the sense of delicious – that the Shimamuras spoke to us about yesterday.  Some of this can be approached through other devices in the exhibition and the various publications: interpretative text, a transcript of the conversation between Professor Hiramatsu, Hayashi-San and the Shimamuras, the images that Kaori Iketsu will create.

Two aspects of the site, for me, will require more consideration. One of these issues relates to the fact that while a roaring jet with undercarriage down and running full flaps presents an arresting sound-image, the singular event is not really the point. What is more important is the sequence, the fact that what can appear as the compressed drama of a landing or take-off is taking place all day, everyday, all year, every year, surrounded by the swirling mass of taxiing noise that begins around dawn and continues until well after dark. How do you represent the series?

The other issue is the question of distance. By distance, I mean the perceived acoustic expanse that stretches between one noise and another. A couple of days ago, I was recording at one of the monitoring stations furthest from the farm. The wind had fallen, the village was suspended in comfortable Holiday quietness. I was waiting for a plane to make its overflight, holding the big microphone still on my out-stretched arm. Out of nowhere, the headphones filled with footfalls, heavy breathing, a ball being bounced on tarmac then against the chain-linked fence. A young boy, bored and in search of company had come over to see what was happening and to show off his baseball skills (a sports demonstration that involved him falling over a couple of times and then whacking the ball well over the fence and into the middle of a golf course where a shout of surprise sent him ducking out of sight, leaving me and my microphone as the sole recipient of startled looks from the fairway). It was a real pleasure to hear all the different distances. Distances in time as one event overcame another, distances in space as things drew nearer and went further away. This sense of distance is something that is frequently obliterated in the farm where the constant racket makes smaller sounds struggle to be heard and makes the relationships between sounds obscure. And yet this sense of distance is what I like working with when composing with sound as much as when mooching about listening to what is going on around me. I wonder whether my imposition of aesthetically-inspired distance onto the soundtrack to the film was what the Shimamuras were really objecting to when they considered that the birdsong, for example, was excessively prominent. So this is another dilemma: do I let go of my sense of what delivers on creative level – layers of sound events, themselves chosen for patterns of interest (semantic or sonic) with audible intervals between them? Do I reach instead for the thickened audio sandwich where the layers of murky sound press against each other?

During these days in Narita I have been reading Oliver Morton’s “Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World” which my friend Dan sent to me just before I left the UK. As its title suggests, one of the book’s preoccupations is humanity’s successive cartographic responses to our neighbouring planet, from the 19th century’s paintings based on telescope observation to the latest digital photographs beamed back from the Mars Pathfinder mission at the end of the 20th century.

In the “Air Band” post, from October 4th, 2010, I talked about the Terminal Control Area Chart for Narita where features that are conventionally represented on maps – roads, and cities, for example – are diminished in size and scale to afford prominence to relief elevations, airways and radio navigation. Two days ago, in the Aeronautical Museum, I found some other maps on display in a mock-up of a control tower. Each of these establishing different relationships to the sundry layers of potential information: geological, political (in the strict sense of “polis”, as signs of human habitation like outlines of urban areas or transport routes), directional (locations of beacons or VHF omni-directional (VOR) range stations) or Air Traffic Control (ATC) service details for live ground-based supervision of flight.

Other maps might also be worth unfolding. Weather maps, for example, are of keen importance. These would not just be relevant for pilots judging how to yaw the plane in alignment with cross-winds or how rain might reduce the affect of braking after touchdown. Wind direction is relevant to the Shimamuras, too, since it can determine which of Narita’s two main runways are going to be used. If the prevailing wind direction allocates Runway B for use then the experience on the farm changes dramatically, putting hulking cylinders of polished steel and noise and heat, like the Qantas 747 that’s just dropped in, some 40 metres above the main building. But weather maps might be equally important for the agricultural identity of the farm, with rain - like the showers we had yesterday as a cold front moved east from Mongolia – changing what activities are possible.

There are still other maps, too: maps of flora and fauna like those we saw at the Chiba City Prefecture museum; noise contour maps like the one on the table in the Mayor’s office; more finely graded sound maps could be developed like those devised in acoustic ecology and adapted since; epidemiological maps might draw together varieties of health indexes in an effort to discern whether patterns of symptoms reveal effects of exposure to aircraft noise; a map of the former farming settlement of Toho that was swept away for the airport after such bitter struggles.

Sitting around the kitchen table yesterday talking to the Shimamuras, it became clear that this last map – which Hayashi, Rupert and Professor Hiramatsu are going to try and find in the Narita City Library – would hold something that our work has not yet managed to grasp. The Shimamuras had watched our first prototype sound film and one of their criticisms of it was that it portrayed them as remote and isolated. Their sense of themselves was very far removed from lonely strugglers bent over the rows of lush vegetables in our depiction. As they talked about their lives on the farm over the past decades, to particular words became charged with meaning and value: ‘delicious’ and ‘solidarity’. It is not so much, then, the pre-Lapsarian community of Toho that we should be trying to map in sound and image. It is the present networks of support and solidarity that the Shimamuras currently enjoy.

How we might achieve this is perhaps the most important task ahead of us.

Like mountain climbers who take a little time to limber up at higher elevations before pushing on to the summit, I feel that over the last few days we have somewhat re-acclimatised ourselves to the altitude we were working at last year. Although not yet up to our earlier pace, we are getting better at arriving, establishing what is going on with the weather, with the planes and with the farmers and organising ourselves accordingly. Certainly, as I listen again to the files in the evenings, I’m getting more and more pleased with what lies on the various memory cards that get ejected from the recorders. If the working practices on the farm continue to lack some of the frenetic lick at which things proceeded during the harvest season, activity at the airport appears to have picked up again after the lull that coincided with the start of the Golden Week holiday. We are once again seeing planes stacked up in a South-North line from nearest to furthest as they ready themselves for the descent into Runway B.

Talking to Shimamura-san and Fujiko-san around the low table in the Egg House in the Autumn, I remember them mentioning the ‘red dust’ that came with the Spring. There is certainly dust here now and a wind to get it going as a cold front crosses over Narita. Fine residue lifts up and swirls from the fields, blows through the courtyard of the farm, has you turning your head and pulling your eye-lids down if a gust comes your way and puffs up behind you as you walk – causing me irresistibly to call up Saturday afternoon TV memories of dusty leather boots coming to a dramatic halt in a Spaghetti Western.

We have not only been filming and recording. Two days ago, we visited the Mayor and council officials in a nearby farming district threatened by a potential extension to the runway and sat round a long table in a wood-panelled room looking at maps showing noise contours, the Mayor pointing out relevant features on a large laminated satellite photograph with an extendible stainless steel and chrome pointer. Yesterday we drove up to Chiba City to the Prefecture Museum to talk to a curator there. Our original intention had been to ask for help identifying the bird calls and song that we had recorded and to discuss how changes in habitat forced by the concrete and steel impositions of the airport and changes in soundscape by the roaring planes might affect the avian population. In an ironic twist, given that the precious parabolic microphone still lies inert and broken, we found ourselves in a beautifully designed nature centre in an artificial wood created from what had once been grassland. The irony was to found in the fact that Rupert, Professor Hiramastu and myself were armed with little parabolic reflectors that incorporated monocular viewers and were connected to a computer that parsed the signal coming through the mic in order to recognise particular species. Hayashi-san, who somehow avoided getting a parabolic himself, found the whole thing particularly amusing, doubtless logging the episode alongside the various other gaffes I have committed – the insect bites, the washing powder in the tumble dryer, the toilet slippers accidentally worn in the living area, the predilection for karē raisu (curry rice), the crawling on the dusty ground or adopting ungainly postures to get a recording, the refusal to give the police my date of birth …

The Museum turned out to provide very interesting background material on how agriculture had developed in this province. For example, the cedar woods that I had understood as ‘wilderness’ remnants from before, were more-than-likely to have been as cultivated as the farmed fields and rice paddies. The Museum exhibition dioramas, in particular, were rendered with compelling appeal. The curator, an expert in avian biology, took us down into the basement of the museum where, after two slipper changes and the unlocking of an airtight steel door, we saw the conservation archives that included individual bequests of insect recordings and, excitingly, recordings from the Narita area made in 1991 by the curator herself.

This afternoon we met with the artist Kaori who also works at the Quignon bakery. Kaori’s work adorns the side Shimamura family’s main Nissan truck and she also contributed artwork to the cover and the inner pages of the Shimamuras’ book Live With The Soil. Rupert and I really like her illustrations. Our recordings and video work has a certain distance, a hardness in its frame and, perhaps, something cold about it, a low temperature that derives from the static perspective we have been adopting. Kaori’s illustrations, on the other hand, bring warmth and softness have an ‘organic’ quality that finds a parallel scale to the Slow Life commitments of the farm. We sat around yet another table, this time in the lobby of the hotel, and discussed whether we could commission her to contribute to the project.

Our tea at the hotel this evening was going to be the standard karē raisu fare. But Hayashi-san’s wife had prepared some exquisite pickled vegetables for us, contained in small glass pots, and supplied with white ceramic dishes and shards of paper-wrapped bamboo with which to spear the food, all wrapped up in a piece of green patterned fabric. In the photo, you can see my sorry attempt to re-create the original presentation.

I am back on the Space Age meets baroque orange PVC seat in the hotel lobby. The floor is comprised of polished marble tiles, the predominant design of which contains different-sized irregular sections spanning the colour spectrum of brown, from the lightest beige to the darkest tan. These brown squares are interrupted by arrangements of squares of green, white and red and there is a large circular composition immediately in front of the three lifts. At the front of the lobby, natural light that floods in through the polished doorways provides the majority of the illumination with recessed spots in the ceiling helping out. Deeper into the ground floor, in the seating areas where we have breakfast and tea, many more spots brighten the atmosphere, becoming shrillest near the servery, where reflective glass multiplies the effect.

Four large blue screens confront you when you enter the hotel. These display scrolling information about flight arrivals and departures: Cairns, Fuzhou, Hanoi, Guangzhou, Guam, Washington DC, Seattle, Tashkent, Amsterdam, Ulan Bator, Shanghai, New York City, Hiroshima, Ho Chi Minh City, Sendai, Bangkok, Fukuoka, Busan, Dallas Ft. Worth, Munich, Zurich, Port Moresby, Moscow, Beijing, Khabarovsk, Dubai, Dalian, Taipei, Seoul, Vienna, Nagoya, Kuching, Rome-Fiumicino and Gold Coast are all getting ready to fly as I type this.

And what can I hear? Perhaps the principal contributor to the soundscape derives from the piped muzak. This changes throughout the day, taking on different tonal colour and different pace according to the waking hour. Something soft and soothing in the dawn time, a little more energetic as the hour of the dog turns to the hour of the wolf. And yet these differences are only fine gradations on a palette that leans towards the neutral, the aural equivalent – perhaps – of all those browns laid out in the fundamental marble tile from which the lobby’s floor is constructed. To someone with a better musical knowledge than me, I suspect the tunes would all be readily identifiable. They seem drawn from a Western repertoire that has – in this form at least – little to offend in its restrained piano keys, controlled guitar strums, moderately breathed wind instruments, muted sweeps of strings. The flute – synthetic or real, I can’t tell – appears to be something those responsible chose to keep in their back pockets, ready to be drawn out and deployed at the slightest melodic notice. None of this should grate – indeed it is presumably designed not to – and yet it sets my teeth on edge and I find myself involuntarily ducking as a new work descends from the speakers hidden in the ceiling above.

It is many decibels distant from the grinding rancour of the taxiing noise and offers a much more glossy acoustic envelope that the rough textures that radiate outwards from the runways. Yet I still experience this elevator music – and yes, it seeps into the confines of the lift as you descend from floor to floor -  as something that exerts an unpleasant pressure on me as a listener (a more unctuous pressure, a less harsh one, but still a pressure).

Elsewhere in the lobby, other sounds rise up. Coughs and sneezes, footfalls (each betraying specific choices of shoe), murmured conversation, greetings from the staff to the guests (of customary importance in Japan), the trundle of luggage and the report of a bag dropped down by a weary traveller, the occasional peal of laughter. The infra-red activated doors wheeze open and shut, the lift doors part and join, accompanied by a ring and a canned announcement, the dryers churn in the Coin-Op laundry, occasionally a printer gets going in the Business Suite, the ice dispenser rattles and the bright-lit vending machines manage an equally bright acoustic of inserted coins and descending metal cans of juice and beer. And the job of running the hotel is laid out in sound, hoovers, cutlery being sorted (and chopsticks, too, giving a local slant on this supposed non-place), the buses’ hydraulic brakes hissing, tables being polished, broadsheet newspapers folded and returned to their shelves. One interesting sound relates to the woven net of plastic that is strung with small spherical silver bells that cover passengers’ luggage when it is left in the foyer. It is too early in the year for the air-conditioning to have kicked in but this will doubltess at its own frequencies to the hubbub when things hot up.

The one thing that it is very hard for my ears to discern in the lobby is any noise from the airport, only a few hundred metres to the west. From my room, I can hear a lot of the airport but in the entrance to the hotel I cannot.

 

 

left to right: Shimamura-san, Hayashi-san, Rupert Cox, Angus, Fujiko-san.

I am writing this post sitting on a spongy orange PVC sofa circling a fake marble pillar illuminated by scalloped glass and brass sconces in the lobby of our hotel. I am waiting for the washing machine to complete its cycle.

Travelling to the farm every day is a very different experience from living on site in the building called the Egg House, as we did last year. In the autumn we were able to follow the patterns of activity on the farm: waking after dawn to film and record in the fields as the farmers harvested crops, returning to the Egg House for our breakfast when they themselves downed tools for a break. For much of the remains of those days we shadowed the farmers’ movements and even when we were elsewhere in the several hectares that comprised the farm, we could still see or hear them. In the evenings, I wrote entries on this blog, Matsui-san, Rupert and I would discuss things, we would back-up our files, listen and watch them (as rushes, effectively) and we would continue to encounter the farmers out and about. If not an intimacy, then we at least shared a sociability. While the farmers continue to be friendly, that connection hasn’t – from my perspective – been made again in the same way. Cooking food on the farm – often from boxes of vegetables grown on the farm itself that were donated by Fujiko – also, I now think, delivered a different sense of inhabitation, albeit provisional, than can ever now be possible as we shuttle back and forth.

As strange as it may sound, given the inhospitality of the farm’s architectural and – primarily – acoustic surroundings, I realise today that we felt very protected there. We saw the airport security patrols, the blue riot police van with its red flashing lights, the police in the watch tower with their binoculars, but we saw them at a distance. We did have a couple of slightly testing episodes with the security around the farm but, tellingly, each occasion was one outside the farm’s perimeter (it had to be, of course, since we are working on private land at the invitation of the farmers). Once we were back on the farm’s terrain I especially – as the least robust one amongst us – felt a great sense of relief. I can clearly remember having gone for a walk to the combini (convenience store) one night and sighing out loud as on feeling the tension drop when I crossed the break in the trees just north of the main building that marks the beginning of the farm. This project would have been a very different one were we to have started it living off-site. As it is, I feel we have effectively been ‘formatted’ by the initial experience, absorbing an operational sense of the relationships that exist at the farm: of how the pieces of land attach to each other and what features (paths, distinctive trees, buildings, fencing, animals - both wild and cultivated) register those attachments; of how the farmers relate to each other and to the tasks the seasons and the produce require of them; and something of how the farm relates to the expanded sense of the airport.

Whatever our living circumstances, our work this time would have always been different. Professor Hiramatsu has brought another dynamic to the situation, offering great insights for our understanding of the correlations between health and noise exposure; suggesting new approaches to the material; and guiding our thoughts outside of the farm towards other contexts in which it is situated: the fate of adjacent areas threatened by proposed runway expansion, the position of the local authorities in the area and the rival technologies (both technical in terms of hardware and conceptual in terms of metrics) involved in measuring the impact of noise.

In the background this time, and also altering how we proceed, is a certain confidence in the audio-visual resources we have already accumulated. Being able to rely on these simultaneously offers a reservoir of things to try again and opens up new streams to explore.