Resonating tin roof

Recording of rain on a tin roof, reimagined by Richard Bentley.

"The remix is inspired by both Tim Shaw’s original recording of rain under a tin roof and John M Hull’s book ‘Touching the Rock’ which explores Hull’s experience of deteriorating eyesight and eventual blindness. The original recording immediately brought to mind this passage from the book: “The rain presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation, but actually and now. The rain gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another... I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me... As I listen to the rain, I am the image of the rain, and I am one with it.” p.27 For a sighted person, the spatial connection that exists between objects and the relationship of those objects with oneself is usually a given. For Hull, it was the rain that allowed him to experience, very deeply, the intricate connections in a scene and it was the wind and thunder that framed it: “Thunder puts a roof over my head, a very high, vaulted ceiling of rumbling sound. I realize that I am in a big place, whereas before there was nothing at all. The sighted person always has a roof overhead, in the form of the blue sky or the clouds, or the stars at night.” p.14 The remix reflects this experience of listening meditatively to the rain and the simple enjoyment of hearing the qualities of objects brought to life by it. My starting point for the remix was to resonate objects found in the garden such as plant pots, a rusty saw and an old spade with the original audio and record the result using microphones and contacts. Around the same time, a field recording I made of rain and a distant thunderstorm across the hills from the village in South Oxfordshire where I live provided both a bed for the track and a rough structure. The resonated recordings were then overlaid, ‘granularised’ and arranged so as to modulate the listeners’ attention between the constituent parts of a sound, sound events and the wider sound field. To creatively encourage this slow shift of attention, two distinct reverberations are employed, created by impulse responses from our garden and a local church. At the end of the remix the resonated objects fade, as thoughts fall away in Hull’s meditation, and the listener is left alone to be with ‘the image of the rain’ and thunder."