Two individuals with long-standing connections to the London docklands + the inner-city musical language of this part of East London, join forces to engage in a live 'first-take' listening session of MSCTY X The Royal Docks [LONDON].

Listen to the full conversation, or dig into the docks through the edited conversation below.

LOCATION: THE CRYSTAL

Alberto Duman: So...we are resurfacing after this intense few minutes ... it's a challenge to listen to something for the first time, particularly something so complex and so layered and so sort of split into various movements.

Joy [White], what's your first response, knowing what we know from what Joy [Joseph] has told us, reading the notes from the website?

Joy White: I was in the Royal Docks before The Crystal was was built, I left just as it was about to be built, and then I came back some years later when it was fully formed and in evidence. I went in there probably in 2015 to have coffee...and it felt like a place that was out of place, it didn't quite connect to where it was – for me anyway.

My feeling on listening to this track from Joy Joseph is that it starts to bring The Crystal into place. It starts to make some connections to where it is.

I heard the kind of reference to the steel pans, and that, for me immediately locates this kind-of-futuristic building to Britain's colonial past: centering this in the heart of where the new future is supposed to be? So I found it a really thoughtful piece of music.

Like it’s saying: "Look forward ... if we had this big and really diverse imagination...look forward to what it [The Royal Docks] might be!"

Alberto Duman: So, there is a sense of opening up and grounding at the same time…
Wow.

I also picked up and I've got written in my notes here "steel pan." It is like we are here, but also in Trinidad and Tobago instantly!

I’m thinking how the steel pan sound immediately became available in the 80s in the QuickTime instruments selection – which was like the simplest source for computer music that you could actually use for free – and the percussive steel pan-like sound was already used heavily into all kinds of techno/house tracks. The intro in Voodoo Ray by A Guy Called Gerald for example.

So...this brings us back to particular notions of ‘the future’ that were conceived at the very moment in which the Royal Docks were in the process of being dismantled and on the way to becoming something else ...

...a kind of sonic radical modernity with multiculturalism and difference at the core of its social project.

I also asked myself whether the angular structure of The Crystal at an architectural level would have particular sonic properties?In a sense the Crystal seems like it’s either on the edge of collapsing, or just ‘resuscitating’ from a previous collapse almost like a flat structure half-way erected.

Possibly it’s not even its finished configuration – it's almost as if it’s ‘on its way’, architecturally speaking, to becoming something.

On another note, I always wondered whether that structure emanates something, exactly like crystals do!?

We have a certain belief system built on crystals and their healing properties, and I'm wondering whether in the architectural choices for the site there was that narrative of this crystal that lands like an alien structure into this place and will emanate healing properties – healing from what ailment you would ask? You could attach to that, the colonial heritage you've been reading in that steel pan sound.

But on another level, did you ask yourself "why Felix?"

Joy White: Yes I did. We know that Felix is the artists’ brother, but I do wonder how old he is? What is his perspective on this particular location? And how connected does he feel to that location, to that structure? 

And it's interesting what you say about The Crystal rising out of the ground and maybe pointing towards the future … I actually had a sense of being pushed away by that particular structure because it doesn't ... seem like a building that was inviting to particular people?

Maybe it was ... but maybe it wasn't supposed to be inviting for people like me ... I don't know.

I'm remembering what was there before, you know, small boats, school water sports ...

The local schools would come and go surfing and boating and all the rest of it. So, actually, remembering all that there before, being replaced with the new, the "forward looking", the "healing process" and the healing properties you mention didn't quite touch me in the same in the same way. 

But then that's the beauty of doing this kind of listening exercise – you get these different perspectives on places that are just part of our everyday!

Alberto Duman: Perhaps the most interesting point, in reference to healing , is that we know very well now the actual future purpose of The Crystal:

I wonder how our listening is now affected by the fact that we know its future as the new home for the Mayor of London!

And he moves here from another architectural structure that has confounded and created a lot of conversation – that particular head shape building, kind of skull, or helmet – you can list countless nicknames that the structure of the GLA in Tower Bridge has elicited until now.

The Mayor of London will enter into another very particular structure, from a kind of anthropomorphic architectural space to a half-collapsed crystal structure; from the human to the inanimate; from a species to a geology. It's interesting how the London mayoral locations seems to follow this very curious architectural shapes: from The Head to The Crystal.

So, back to Felix, and I’m taken by this transfer. The family member [Felix] of the musician [Joy Joseph] is like a medium, the intermediate to the actual reality of the space. There is an interesting relinquishing of a direct perception by the musician, who is actively engaging with another being as an intermediate to the sonic property that she refers to, that being a family member.

I like this idea of asking someone else, and that Joy [Joseph] calls in her brother as a witness, an active translator to help her decode something about this structure.

Joy White: Yeah, I like that. I like that about it. And I think, and I imagine that we're hearing some of Felix's youthful perspective in the piece, but we just don't know…?

Alberto Duman: It's interesting because Felix is given as a young male, but the voices that we hear in that beautiful second movement are perceived as female – those kind of staccato voices that also remind us of a certain other musical traditions, perhaps the use of the voice in Philip Glass soundtracks or some ambient music soundscapes that work with voices, or even the synthesized voices of Laurie Anderson?

Out of curiosity, as we were looking into this, I pulled up Felix Royal Docks in Google and it turns out that Felix is the [female] cat that lives in the offices of RoDMA! This is just off the tangent and lateral to this of course but it has made the news in the London Royal Docks website !

Somehow, we have another Felix in the story here, and it brings up one of the several authorities involved in the governance of the Royal Docks, which has always resulted in a parcelling of responsibilities and ideas - often conflicting - about what is wished for, or permissible, or legitimate for the future of the Docks.

So this strange and weird reference [to Felix the Cat] is not that weird after all … !

The other thing I wanted to say is that I guess another reason why we're doing this live listening session, and something I suppose we share with some of the makers of these tracks, is the agency of sounds as a way of exploring space that reveal alternative regimes of knowledge, that are not fully captured by the visual. 

So, there is a certain complimentary reading offered here.

Initially the tracks were made for us to be in a specific space with a specific spatial component, a sonic landscape that accompanies the walkers as they move into space. The sonic here is supposed to be a collaboration with the visual but also a way to offset the primacy of the visual in locating us in space. I suppose it is much harder to shut down a visual space and attempt to cross that space [e.g. ‘blind’ walking experiences, being guided by someone] but you can block your hearing and still cross the space to an extent with less risks.

These tracks were meant for us to see, to have our eyes open, but heard in partial isolation from the surroundings, through headphones. Sonic space being flooded by these other sounds they would block out the ambient sound.

Here we are experiencing them in a very disembodied way, which is quite interesting – though perhaps we should at least remind ourselves that the musicians compose the tracks with a certain listening in mind, different than the one we are working through at the moment.

LOCATION: STOTHERT & PITT CRANES

Alberto Duman: Wow...Are you OK Joy?

Joy White: I suppose this is the thing with the live listening, you know, the time to process your feelings about something … I just feel really emotional about what I just heard!

Alberto Duman: Me too!

Joy White: I think in the beginning all I could hear is the drilling and so on.

You can kind of hear echoes of those heavy industries that Newham was a site for in the past, and the types of jobs people did and what they got from that type of work.

That sense of purpose, even though it was hard and dirty and heavy.

And then now when you hear those sounds on the whole – those kinds of drilling and building – is to build luxury apartments that probably no one can afford …

It felt like a kind of song for what's been lost?

I really felt the kind of breaking, the breaking and the shattering of what was, but not just what was, also what could have been.

Because it could have been different. 

It didn't need to become a place where there is no room for people who seem to be ordinary .... we can talk about that forever, about who The Royal Docks are for, but it certainly isn't for the people that were there before?

I also heard a sense of melancholy.

I went to primary school in the 1960s. My parents are Jamaican they came here from the Caribbean part of that generation and often-told story ...

Sometimes, me and my sister, when we were in  primary school, we were made to sing old English folk songs. We used to sing sea shanties to help ‘to make you English’. To help you form your identity as an English person, and there was a little bit in [this track] that sounded like ‘Scarborough Fair’!

So little touches in the sounds of this track, just kind of took me back to a place of being five or six years old, and not really understanding what the food was – but pretending to – and not really understanding why we were singing these songs, and the songs making no real sense, but singing them any way because that's what you did.

What I'm trying to say is that I think it's this sense of longing, the sense of loss, remembering the kind of identities that were created for you, made for you, that didn't fit you. And, the crumbling of it all. And what am I mourning – what am I mourning?

I am mourning things that don't necessarily belong to me.

Alberto Duman: Yeah, they [the cranes] were not even made for you.

In fact, perhaps as they part of the mercantile reality of the docks, what are they really the remnants of?

Perhaps in this particular track we have a very direct reference. I think the artist has decided to make a very direct reference, which I think is asking a question that comes from the very positioning that these cranes are supposedly already mourning? 

From the title ‘Swansong’, Ecka asks ‘Whose song are they singing’?

And I think that's also where your sense of being baffled, of being shuttled in-between either wanting to be part of a celebration that obviously would not be yours, or celebrating events that eventually were the demise of many people involved in the docks comes from – or even events that were complicit in the abuse of so many people in the mercantile colonial inheritance. So what do these cranes say?

Maybe this is where the transfer from the listening and the moment of listening, and this kind of strange manifestation of language takes place.

I wrote "siren rising". I am speaking of the very long held tonality right at the beginning. For me, it was like a siren that rises up at the beginning: I heard it as a call, I heard as a warning, I heard it as a reckoning, and I heard it as a spell. I heard it as many, many things, but I felt incredibly held by its sonic embrace.

I felt like being held up at that mid height, not on the ground, some place where that tonality seems to hover, and that prepares me emotionally until we are literally crushed by the sound of smashed bricks [or some building material] so the very constituent part of the architecture is no more.

And what I found even more interesting in this moment is that the anxiety, this holding, this piercing, the cracking, then seems to witness the emergence of voices. It's really interesting. It's like almost all of these voices that we've heard in the first track are coming back?

And I thought, maybe what emerges from this cracked matter are the more embedded, real voices who sing the song: they're trapped in this matter and the matter needs to be crushed in order to ooze them out of itself!

It's almost like when in physics you need an accelerator of particles to smash them onto a surface to crack open their insides, so that the scientist can actually analyze them.
And these voices, these angelic beautiful voices, suddenly seem to emerge from these violent acts.

I'm not sure whether we are witnessing a process of transformation, or liberation or emancipation, or the final freeing of voices that have been trapped for too long in those bricks, and are eager to emerge? I think this seems to me a track that speaks of the whole of the Royal Docks!

I love the fact that she's being able to use one specific location – one specific visual cue – a silent witness, a strange industrial animal frozen, dinosaurs in plain air. A raucous type of open air Natural History Museum, but not quite. More a social history museum. And this for me has always been one of the strange components of the Royal Docks: that tension between museumification and exploitation, between mummification and total remake. An everyday museum of the place that once existed within its spaces.

It's a very beautiful track. Let me just say here that the transcript might not take notice of this, but after listening to this track we've had two pauses after the listening and let some silence ground our thoughts.

So perhaps this is what the ‘sonic’ should do. Perhaps it should offer some respite from, and antidote to, the logocentric way we share our feelings and intellectual conversations – a kind of ‘shut up and listen’ reminder!

Joy White: Yeah!

Alberto Duman: This track really seems to say to me that "if you carefully tune yourself in stillness with a place, you will hear unspoken voices emerging ... seeping through the atmosphere of the place …"

LOCATION: THE ROYAL VICTORIA FOOTBRIDGE

Alberto: This is a very interesting location, the Royal Victoria Footbridge.

For quite some time in the last few years, there were talks about replacing this bridge as a part of the new Royal Docks developments, and this is one of those stories that are quite typical of the kind of planning history of this place. A history of future scenarios, boisterous claims, of massive investments projected and planning permissions that are given, and then of plans which fail to materialise and then become a planning history, that is hardly reconsidered after the next big plans come forth.

This site in particular has been at the centre of decades of possible futures that didn’t happen in the Royal Docks.

We do not have time to get into this, but we are discussing here the new crossing between the Excel and the Millennium Mills that was part of the granted planning permission in 2016 under the name Silvertown Quays to a consortium called Silvertown Partnership. 

Alberto Duman: First of all, I think that probably we should acknowledge here that we are really listening to these tracks in a quick succession, as if they were tracks on an album, but of course they're not meant to be heard or experienced this way.

I'm saying that because I guess from my point of view, after having experienced Ecka Mordecai's Swansong which left us so open to many emotional responses, this felt a lot less emotional, and to an extent much more architecturally defined and attuned to the infrastructure in its materiality.

This one [Passing Currents] is really a field recording-centred piece. We hear the sounds of the bridge that we know very well from the type of metal platform and the specific sounds it creates ... it felt like a piece that is asking something to the structure, rather than an interpretation of the structure.

It collects those sounds, it mixes them into a sonic structure of its own, we feel like we are experiencing an actual structure, trying to tell us something. And, obviously after two tracks where voices are so prominent we notice the lack of voices here.

For these and other reasons perhaps I was less moved ... but this is not a judgement, more a question of tonalities and frequencies and the way that we find ourselves embodying these or not. The only other thing I wanted to say at this point is that it's interesting that in this case the musicians acknowledge they've newly arrived in the Royal Docks as residents. 

And perhaps that arrival is into a place that is often a lot more silent that other parts of the city .. it is a space that remains still quite alien, and the musicians here are trying to probe, to prompt, to trigger a response using specific recording technology, the various capturing devices, almost like as scientists or explorers, with a sound archeology approach that – rather than being applied to ancient structures – is applied to contemporary ones, and their recent history.

It's as if the structures themselves are the way for them to understand this place they recently moved into...lacking in direct human storytelling, the place itself might have something to say…?

One strange aspect of listening to this piece is that it made the structure feel unstable. I felt like if I was listening to this track on the actual bridge, which might make me feel slightly uneasy? Perhaps that's exactly the point – to reflect the vibrations of the structure? 

Joy White: Thanks for giving this kind of context into our listening task. To listen to these tracks in an order that really is quite artificial: we wouldn’t do it that way if we were on site.

For this one, I was interested in what you said: "it felt like it was asking a question but not answering it."

I felt like I wasn't going anywhere, but maybe that was the point? And even though it started off as a kind of soundscape without a rhythm, as it went on, it became more rhythmic and so I felt like I was on the move, but not moved.

When you talked about the instability you felt in your own listening, that was it for me:  the instability was the holding on to those two feelings or sensations at the same time [on the move, but not moved.]

I didn't get a sense of any human input into the space of this listening, but again, maybe that's the point. Maybe it is to tell us something about how infrastructures can operate in those sonic landscapes. They dampen down the sound of the human, of the people, but there's also something about it that makes me think ‘I need to listen to that again and see where it takes me this time.

Alberto Duman:

"Of course, so much of the Royal Docks is non-human, to the extent that it is also sometimes a place that dehumanizes you in a strange way, because of the way it is strangely fragmented, with all the crossings and infrastructure that you have to go through to connect with others. And because of all the time that it might take you to meet another human as you cross it."

Aside from some moments of bustle – and particularly for someone who just moved there – one of those strange reactions to being in the Royal Docks is like "Who lives here?’" or "Where are the people?’" Perhaps "What happened to this place?"

It's exactly the transition from a place that used to be so spectacularly full of activities, of work, of that mercantile energy, and people and humanity of all kind [but barred from visitors to see this because it was restricted to those who worked there] that’s kind of baffling to newcomers.

Then the Royal Docks closed and suddenly it supposedly became again a public space, but by and large evacuated by everyone who actually populated it up until that point in time [In terms of density, "London" seems to be very far away, aside from at specific busy places like the UEL campus.]

I think in some strange ways the Docks are still there, hanging on to that long transition. Why else would there be a need for such efforts of ‘placemaking’ if that wasn’t the case? 

And that’s also why for newcomers that [who lives here, and where are they?] remains a baffling question.

Aside from the fact that [this emptiness] perhaps brings the pleasures of a more strangely peaceful place. I wonder if that’s why that question, in the case of Passing Currents, is asked of an inanimate, non-human agent which has witnessed people crossing, and using it.

Maybe that’s also the whole drive behind the Musicity project approach?

I mean, the musicians come here asking this to the infrastructure:

- "Please tell me about these people because I don't know where to get the stories of this place ... and maybe YOU [the structures] know something out of your frequency and response?"

- "Maybe, If I beat you with sticks and probe you with devices, maybe you will emanate ‘something’ in sonic terms that I can capture with my instruments and you'll tell me ... if I can read your coded sonic responses?"

But mostly it seems an attempt that is left unanswered. 

That's the unsettling character of this piece of music for me, for us. We’d like to go and listen again...maybe we missed something from that beating … ?

It makes me feel like these are also some of the questions that the Real Docks Team are grappling with as they look to create an ‘identity’ for this place.

Knowing from its recent history, how every time, masterplan after masterplan, it has been packaged into a constructed identity. You can see why they probably would think of asking artists and musicians to ‘reveal’, ‘investigate’, make visible, or audible ... "please tell me how to find the voice of this place!"

And that possibly also means that either these responses are not coming from consultations and open voice forums, or the question is how to ‘read’ those voices? Or even, to an extent, a desire to listen to those voices once they are manifested, since they speak from other perspectives – other settlements with the place, other ways of imagining or imaging them?

Alberto Duman: I found myself reflecting on our exercise ... First of all, we were probably some of the first people listening to these tracks, as they are officially released today [4th December 2020]. So, we're somehow pioneers, and I was reflecting on a parallel, but very relevant event that that we are both happening today – the book launch of Malcolm James’ ‘Sonic Intimacies’ which actually fits very well with these offering of intimate moments of co-listening. 

So I just wanted to briefly read something here from his introduction:

"The notion of sonic intimacy while habitually known, is also somewhat illusory.
Scholarship on the sonic has opened up regimes of knowledge not fully captured by the visual, and literature on intimacy has enabled an exploration of relationships, inter-subjectivity, feeling, forces and vibes not present in textual approaches to social and cultural life".

[Malcolm James, Sonic Intimacies, 2020]

Whilst this may seem an unashamed plug for a friend and colleague [!] as well as one of the co-editors of Regeneration Songs, I would contend that it's not a casual reference.

Essentially, my point is that quite a lot of music and sonic materials produced for these forms of ‘walking and listening’ in specific places in the world, are usually to be experienced by headphones, in the manner of asynchronous audio tours.

These are pre-recorded, but meant to be experienced in particular conditions and spaces. So whilst at one level they are intimate listenings in the moment of the individual experience, they are also experiences that are meant to create communities of listeners: all those who experienced those offerings, also share intimate moments in the sonic consciousness of particular places, and participate in the social construction of the imagining of those places.

And it's through a shared language, much like what we're doing here – what are shared are place narratives in sonic form, heard at first by our bodies as alternative cognitive experiences that – like Malcolm suggests – explore the sonic as a mode of knowledge that exposes "feeling, forces, and vibes not present in textual approaches to social and cultural life" not too often – not often enough – shared.

If there is a hope for the Royal Docks to be affected by these sonic offerings, it is that these particular tracks will be repeatedly and openly discussed in forums and listening sessions, where people will respond to them in conversation, thus refocusing their own narratives of those places: confronting them with one another’s perception in an aesthetic and political conversation at once.

Essentially these ground level conversations and confrontations about place narratives are exactly what makes a space become a ‘place’.

LOCATION: THE THAMES BARRIER

Alberto Duman: What’s interesting is that the Thames Barrier is part of this area, but belongs here in a particular kind of way, firstly because it connects to the other side of the Thames, and it’s a much more recent urban structure without the kind of history of the Docks and all that the current regeneration team is contending with.

I mean, it’s an architectural feature which is part of London as a whole, acting as a protective agent for the whole of London.

We are now on track number 4 and of course instinctively we are starting to recognize some patterns across the tracks we heard – even if these are not intended to be heard, or meaningful in their connections – and this is, you know, a particular causality of our particular form of listening today, so we might be making wild assumptions here!

Joy White: I'm still trying to get to grips with this one, I'm still trying to process what I heard. I think for me it was unsettling for a number of reasons, but mainly because I don't recognize it. 

I don't recognize the sounds as they appeared, so I'm just trying to work out what they are. Why is it so unfamiliar? Why is it so out there? Why is it something that feels so unknowable?

I don't know.

And then I started to connect it to something that I do recognize, something that sounds known to me and, it sounded like the London Underground!

It sounded like being on the Tube, and that's an experience that I don’t have very often – an experience that I avoid, for long historical reasons. But when I do go on there, it's an uncomfortable and disturbing experience, and I can't wait to get off, and to get out. I realise that this track was unnerving for me in that way, and I wanted the experience to stop. 

I didn't want the sound to stop, but I wanted the experience to stop. It was transporting me in a way that I didn't want it to, and to a place that I didn't really want to go to either. And so what I'm still working out is, why, and what that is? Does that make any sense at all?

Alberto Duman: Yes! I've also found myself lost in this piece of music.

I was trying to find handles in a human world that will allow me to empathize or to transcribe [the sounds] to enter into a certain space ... whilst knowing that somehow this place is not meant for me.

Perhaps the music is not meant for us, because the artist [GALYA BISENGALIEVA] refers to the underwater space, to the underwater structure of the Thames barrier, which operates mechanically and remotely.

The barrier is maneuvered by human actions, but located in places where humans are not supposed to be [beside for their maintenance or repair should it be needed!]

A device like a microphone can be plonked into a certain space and capture sounds, but a human in that particular space with heavy water currents would probably be incredibly endangered there ... certainly this is not a piece to be ‘experienced on site’ like some of the others! We will never be right there where the sounds are recorded in this track.

The human agency is extended into the recording device, standing for the body in its listening, but clearly without the body ever taking the space of the microphone or hydrophone. Perhaps a way to see this remote sonic investigation is really to reflect on the agency of the machine in human survival? This place – this place that is supposed to protect us here in London. But we cannot be there ourselves to witness firsthand all the [subterranean] machines that protect us, and so only another machine, a disembodied recording agent, can do that aural witnessing for us … ?

There's a level of abstraction to this that's really strong, and not just because of the sounds we hear, but also because of the actual distancing that stands in-between us and the sources of those sounds: sounds we would never experience for ourselves.

Probably for all these reasons this is the most abstract track we heard so far.

Therefore it's also most probably the least easy to place ourselves into as listeners. We are also remote listeners here today! Maybe when looking at the barrier, the connection is rather different?

And then again, we both heard these disembodied voices that keep appearing in these tracks. This is the third track out of the four we listened so far that clearly speaks to us via some strange disembodied voices that are not there ... and this one even more so, given that neither our bodies nor any other bodies will be there at the source of the sound to hear them.

We encounter a place that has voices without bodies, these ghostly voices that have no human form or shape or recognizable social identities, and this [sound] is obviously the unsettling part, that perhaps the musicians here are responding to? I mean, how else would one explain the consistent presence of voices in musical composition conceived separately?
 
Though I found myself strangely pulled in, and perhaps because I was looking for something to grasp, as I was listening I started to do a little side research. I found that the artist is Khazaki-British and – I can’t quite figure out why – I was drawn to the fact that one of the reasons why I'm aware of Kazakhstan is through having heard and seen images and films about its capital city Astana, which I now realize last year was renamed Nur-Sultan after the name of the departing president of the country.

Astana/Nur-Sultan is one of the most incredible urban places on a global scale, both in architectural and political terms, because the entire city has been constructed in a very short space of time. It's one those capital cities which has been completely planned to establish authority and power and new wealth coming from the burgeoning oil trade.

It contains some astonishing baffling architectural pieces, typical of the neoliberal city symbology: a pyramid, a tower, all that array of morphology of built environment that we have learned to understand as the signature pieces of any regeneration that cometh to us ... the pseudo-techno-futures we are supposed to recognise as our own. Certainly Nur-Sultan is a place where a structure like The Crystal would be perfectly ‘at home’!
Some really wild instinctive connections here brought about by this acts of listening that burst some unlikely paths of thinking into action!

Still, here I am pursuing this connection here between a musician whose sensibility might or might not be affected by this other specific place in the world, an emerged/emergent economy, whose richness and lavish expenditure in new built infrastructures is based on oil and gas. The energy that the authorities in charge have spent in creating this massive infrastructure which truly deserves the adjective ‘delirious’ – or ‘post-delirious’ when transposed on a global scale – as well as the branding of a ‘Supernova City’. These Las Vegas' of their own deserts that have caused Chinese cities like Shanghai to become aspirational models, planning miracles of speed of transformation that everyone else seems to want to imitate.

And maybe, the casual, random connection that this track has been setting into motion has a purpose and connection after all. The ‘London’s Regeneration Supernova’ movie, which was produced by the LDA/Newham in 2010 [and stands as the originating evidence for my "Music for Masterplanning and Regeneration Songs"] is the spark that lit this ongoing phase of the Royal Docks ‘remake’. The movie set its ambitions exactly in that same language of the ‘miraculous’ growth and development speed that Shanghai came to signify ... and in the notion that massive investments in the Royal Docks would propel them into the same miraculous trajectory of transformation.

LOCATION: SOUNDWALK ALONG FACTORY ROAD

Joy White: I'm struck by the fact that we've already listened to the first four tracks, which are ‘sound’ in its usual sense, so we have all of that, and the voices in those tracks mostly have been muted, processed, inserted, or extracted by the musicians. Yet here we have a track where the narration is at the forefront, with the sounds in the background, and [the narration is] just kind of walking us through this very, very long road, which I'm familiar with. It's a road that has one way in, and one way out. At the far end there's the Woolwich Ferry and at the other end is Silvertown, but there are no roads off!

Then on the other side we have the Tate & Lyle factory ... and even from the name of the track, you know that’s what the place was created for, to house those places where materials and heavy industry could be processed from the docks. The docks that were built from enslaved labour, the docks that enriched this country that we're in. The Tate & Lyle factory that processed the sugar, the sweet richness that this this country built its industrial and economic advances on. And it's just astonishing! It's astonishing to hear this narration of this particular place from Debbie and then thinking about the Tate & Lyle logo with the biblically inspired [but scientifically incorrect!] "dying Lion feasted upon by bees" on the front, and all of those kind of colonial, post-colonial sentiments that go along with Britain's relationship to sugar and sweetness and the sweetness and that wasn't there for the people that made it made it happen.

So, yeah, it's a really powerful piece!

Having this voice at the front and the sounds underneath, feels like it's comforting, though it’s telling a story that's really terrible in many ways for the people that worked in the factories on factory road, for the people that did those hard and dirty jobs – it's a story told in a comforting way, though it's not a comfortable story!

[‘sugar’ making the uncomfortable story more palatable…?!]

I was energized by that story ... and felt a strong desire to hear more, and to add to it in some way, as well.

Alberto Duman: Amazing, thanks Joy!

LOCATION: WOOLWICH FOOT TUNNEL

Alberto Duman: So first impressions are ...

I think that if MSCTY X Royal Docks was an album, then this track would possibly be expected to be the first ‘single’ to come out of it!

It's a deeply musical track – a wonderful stomper – that gives one a majestic sense of marching through a space which is confining us to that linear sense of space and progression.

I love the way in which each orchestral component arrives towards us, exactly because WE walk in towards it, towards the source of its acoustic manifestation! It reminds me of an amazing sequence in the film "Birdman". Michael Keaton and Edward Norton
are going for a walk around the block to have an intense conversation, to clear their conflict both on and off camera. As we are going around the block, all the sounds are actually picked up ‘live’ as the two people are in the conversation, so we hear the sounds too as they hear them, as if we are sharing in their listening space, hearing the sonic environment they hear as they move. It's an amazing take of both cinematic and acoustic sense of ‘presence’, though of course this is all part of the fiction in fiction films, with the impression of continuity actually being crafted through amazingly creative tricks! 

And at some point, the sounds of the drum that we hear in the distance [and that accompany the whole film's unique, drum-only soundtrack!] come closer and closer, becoming louder and louder, until we actually encounter the drummer who is in the streets playing the score live [he's played by the wonderful Antonio Sanchez who is the actual soundtrack composer/performer]. As Keaton and Norton's characters complete their ‘round the block’ journey of just over a minute, and return at the entrance of the theatre they left just a few minutes before, we feel like we’ve been around the world in 85 seconds.

For the same reasons – technical, acoustic, narrative, spatial, cultural – I feel like this is a momentous and phenomenal track! And again, with the polyphonic voices I’m reminded of an atonal choir I heard in a film [yes, I have very strong cinematic references for sound quite often, because I love soundtracks, sometimes more than the actual films!]

The choir I mean is the strange choir that we encounter in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, where the character played by James Franciscus goes to rescue Taylor [Charlton Heston]. In this scene, the remaining humans on the planet have learned to survive for a long time underground, and they worship the only remaining atomic bomb, which they took with them in the underground as the ultimate deterrent and defense against being discovered and overcome by the Apes, who will come and eventually submit them to their rule.

The ritual we witness is the Bomb Worship, and as part of it we hear some unsettling strange multi-tonal choir performing a deeply unsettling chant that possibly accompanies the unhinged character of those who administer the ceremony in the movie. The score is from Leonard Rosenman, and that choir sound and approach seems influenced by Oliver Messaien, or György Ligeti of course, whose work was made famous in mainstream listening through the use of his compositions as part of the soundtrack of "2001: A Space Odyssey".

There is something really odd and magical coming together in this beautiful piece, it's a dynamic, fluid musical journey across a linear space that becomes the journey of our bodies as ‘playheads’, borrowing the old term for how cassette players used to read and record sound. Perhaps what he offers to me – at the end of this deliberately ‘static’ imaginary journey across real spaces and through the music composed for them – is the most hopeful voice in the whole array of sounds that we have listened to this morning.

Here, we are actually walking into the soundtrack, we are walking the length of the soundtrack in real time and space. I think it's a genial touch, this approach of structuring the track exactly to follow a walk and the duration of that walk ... so intelligent and still playful and totally engaging on a pre-cognitive level as bodies, moving with agency to ‘make the sound come forth’. Listening with headphones, I could really space these things out as I was literally guided through his walk, even though I'm not walking at all, and I'm really looking forward to doing this again, to going out there and actually walking through the Woolwich Foot Tunnel, with this track in my headphones.

Why so hopeful then?

Well, the sense I get – even from this limited body experience, here and now – is that I’m emerging on the other side of the tunnel, with a sense of being transformed. This is where the HOPE emerges with us, the reminder that we can embody, embrace and take up the transformative agency that we can all have – that we should all have – in ‘making spaces’ and how music can be the carrier and propeller of that agency of ‘Right to the City’ in its best possible way. 

This was really a great way to end!

As listeners, we also perform here: the negotiation between the imaginary space that we construct through all of these sonic offerings, and the actual sonic experiences in these spaces in the Royal Docks that we will have in the near future. These are ways of meaningfully ‘engaging’ in the area's remaking – in multi-temporal directions, at once past, present and future – as we live in the gaps between the actual built environment and our spatial imaginary of them in all its components.

Joy Joseph: Can I just say before I go, how much I've enjoyed the experience of doing this, because it's such an unusual thing to do. We don't usually listen like this, with this kind of intent, in this way.

And having the opportunity to make this kind of conversation, about what we're listening to – within the context of knowing that we're listening to sounds that are created to be heard in a specific place, but we're not in the place. For me, it's been really powerful! Listening to each of these pieces of music in turn has been a revelation in a number of ways. I've really appreciated the opportunity to do that.

Alberto Duman: Thank you Joy! And likewise, I also feel very enriched by this listening experience. I'm sure that this will stay with us for some time. Thank you very much!
I'm really grateful to you for wanting to join in this strange and beautiful experience, and I truly commend the work of ALL the artists and musicians who have worked so hard to create these tracks, providing such a wonderful experience for us, and for anyone who will be able to listen to them from now on.

They have ALL made a lot of sense in their different ways of providing us with ‘sonic’ knowledge, offering their ‘constructions’ of space and gifting us these aural mappings of the Royal Docks.