Introducing: The Storm Cone
From 29 May: Download the app to your device now via Google Play (Android), the App Store, or visit thestormcone.com to find out more
About the work:
The Storm Cone is a new, immersive artwork that unearths lost bandstands and their buried past. At its centre is a journey through music and sound that considers our relationship with the past, while charting the fading away of a brass band during the interwar years (1918 – 1939).
Anyone can experience The Storm Cone via the free app. Using a phone or tablet (and preferably headphones), the first encounter will be with the band performing as a full ensemble. You will then be able to move amongst the absent musicians, before following each of them to explore eight spatial sound works – or you can visit the project website for an offsite experience and additional information: thestormcone.com
The title of the work comes from a Rudyard Kipling poem from 1932 which forewarned of World War II. Serving as warning shot, The Storm Cone contemplates the residual impact of the interwar period and the cyclical nature of history in terms of current events, including the economic downturn and the rise of populism, extremism, racism and antisemitism; problems now exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The resulting experience will be an artwork that is imbued with a sense of both loss and celebration which underlines human strength and fragility.
In Peel Park it will be located on the site of the original bandstand. It will also be presented in Chalkwell Park, Southend.
Read more: new publication
Find out more about the making of The Storm Cone in our new publication. Featuring poetry by Jackie Kay and writing by Nicholas Blincoe and Jacky Bowring. Click here to view.
About the artist:
Laura Daly is a multi-award–winning artist who creates site specific and site related artworks that range significantly in scale. She exhumes the past and teases out fragments of the forgotten using a variety of media, including sound, drawings, mapping, video and material objects. This archaeology of lost time is rooted in in-depth research, where evidence, trace or suggestion generate a haunted exposition of our surroundings. Local stories and people also contribute. Fusing together history, memory, myth and story, Laura’s immersive artworks capture a particular kind of longing that resides within the threshold of absence (known as saudade in Portuguese and hiraeth in Welsh).
About the composer:
Award winning composer, Lucy Pankhurst has received many accolades for her work. She became the first female composer to receive a British Composer Award in the Brass/Wind Band category for her piece ‘In Pitch Black’ (2011), which was also the first brass band work to win a BCA. Her music is premiered and commissioned the world over including the IWBC Philadelphia/Seraph Brass, the Brass Band Aid Project/Prairie Brass of Illinois, the BBC Free Thinking Festival and the Ageas International Salisbury Arts Festival.
About the project:
Commissioned by University of Salford Art Collection and Metal in collaboration with Salford Culture and Place Partnership on the occasion of Rediscovering Salford. Generously supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. Also supported by PN Daly Ltd and Zinc and Copper Roofing.
Music recorded and performed by students, staff and friends of the University of Salford.
Image courtesy the artist.
