Becoming Lichen - irregular diary - part 2

18.09.24

St David’s Church Cemetery, Newtown

I visit the cemetery at St David’s in June with Steffan, the Oriel Davies director. Searching for lichen, we come across the grave of John Roberts, Newtown’s famous gypsy harpist. The headstone is patterned with a variety of crustose lichens criss-crossing the decorative inscriptions. The graveyard is generally rich with lichen life.

I return in September with my friend, the harpist, Ceri Owen Jones from Cei Newydd.

The idea we have is to listen through the lichen colonies on the gravestone, using the contact mic’s attached to the stone. Ceri gently leans the harp against the stone and plays quietly along with the other sounds he hears.

What takes us by surprise is that the headstone behaves like a sound mirror, it not only picks up and reverberates with the sounds moving through the stone and lichens, but it also seems to amplify the ambient sounds of the rooks, traffic, and nearby voices. It is a dry and bright day, the sound world is also bright and alive.

A kind of acoustic assembly of stone, lichen, harp and local ambience appears - something symbiotic perhaps? a folding of these materials, voices, times and place.

We continue to explore…

- Simon Whitehead