Ancestral Reverb
Playing with one of the oldest recordings of a pit brass band to explore carbon heritage.
What is your sound heritage? Do you play an instrument? If not, how many generations back is your family’s most recent musician?
There is something deeply beautiful about seeing generations of a family or community playing music together. The collective breath and skill transforming a community into an organ - a great lung, singing out harmonies that are passed down through the decades and centuries.
Carbon Heritage is more than the billions of tonnes of coal our families have burnt into the atmosphere. It’s more than the generations of innovation and engineering, the train-tracks, engines, and wealth built up over the sigh of an empire. It’s the remembered feel of granda’s callouses, the tobacco and dust smell. It’s the cold feel of the trumpet mouth-piece on your lips. It’s the scaffolding of social action, solidarity and demonstration that all our progressive politics are built on now. It’s more than that.
What is it to you, Carbon Heritage? The rope you hold, passed to you by the ones who came before, weaving on to the ones who come after.
We are creating a little audio project to delve into these ideas.
Here are some things we’re bringing together…
Some of the oldest known recordings of pit brass bands, selected by the Brass Bands England Archivist
A new recording of the Durham Miners’ Association brass band playing those same archival pieces
We’re journeying down an old mine shaft at Beamish, digitally capturing the reverb of the mine so that we can give any recording the sound of that space
We’re working with the brilliant musician Bert Verso to weave together the brass recordings into an electronic piece
We’re gathering together some retired miners - our last living generation of coal miners - alongside their kids and their kids’ kids - to talk about carbon heritage and what that means to them
We’re working with a well known poet (to be announced soon) who will draw on the content from our chats with miners and their families to create a poem / spoken word piece to join the music
Finally, all of this will be brought together and printed for a limited edition vinyl release.
We can’t wait to share the sounds!
