Hannah Rickards | Thunder

Hannah Rickards

Thunder

Bath, UK: Media Art Bath, 2005

12" vinyl LP

Edition of 500

The first line in the London-based artist's bio reads "Hannah Rickards explores the relationship between natural phenomena and our experience of them." This is a rich philosophical idea, right out of the gate: that natural phenomena and our experience of them are different things. 

Her practice is not so much a reconciliation of the two, but an exploration of the gap between them. 

In 2002, Rickards took recordings of six birds and slowed them down, extending the passages until the pitch was low enough that they were in the artist's own vocal range. She learned and sang the bird's complicated melodies and then sped her recordings up to the speed of the original tape. Birdsong was then presented in the gallery space alongside a typewritten text that described the process.

In 2007, she travelled to Alaska to interview people who maintain that they have heard the aurora borealis. She transcribed the interview responses verbatim and displayed them on red, green and blue monitors: 

"The sound I think it makes is, is that whispering sound, to me it sounds, it almost sounds, um, uh, what’s the word I’m thinking? Um, like historic, not historic, but, um, oh: a legend, it, it sounds like a legend, you know, when you think of a legend or something way back in the past you get that, that, it sounds like that to me, like this legend or somebody’s, this whispering sound: it’s a legend.”

"It was like a crackling sound," reported one Northern Lights witness, while another likened the sound to the hum of “a lightsaber, you know, from Star Wars”. 

In the first decades of the 20th century, when accounts from settlements across northern latitudes reported that sound that sometimes accompanied the aurora borealis as like "rustling silk" or "two planks meeting flat ways”. Similar testimony followed in Norway and northern Canada, but the scientific community remained skeptical. 

It wasn’t until 2016 (nine years after Rickards' project) that a Finnish study claimed conclusive results regarding auroral acoustics being audible to the human ear. 

For Thunder, Rickards took a recording of a single thunder clap and slowed it down from eight seconds to seven minutes. Composer David Murphy transcribed the resulting sounds for a a sextet of flute, cello, trumpet, trombone, viola and violin. The score was performed and recorded, then sped up again, returning it to the original eight seconds. 

Side One of the LP presents the completed project - the compressed, thunderclap-length performance of the score. The b-side includes the seven minute version. 

Unlike Birdsong, the orchestral Thunder does not successfully mimic the sonic shock wave produced by lightning. 

Murphy maintains in the liner notes that "this is un-composed music that actually sounds composed” but it’s difficult to imagine that the nature of scoring for traditional instruments didn’t encourage the inclusion of traditional musical notions of melody, harmony and repetition. Even if the results are an atonal mess. 

The limited-edition 180 gr vinyl recording comes packaged in a sleeve that Rickards describes as “slightly over-saturated colours … to mimic as closely as possible the appearance of the stacks of old classical records that one sees in second-hand/charity shops”. The packaging also includes a booklet of the complete printed score.

"Thunder’s sleeve is a perfect homage to the music library sound effects records of yesteryear; a fusion of does-what-it-says-on-the-tin literalism and Betjemanesque melancholy; that mix of poetry and pragmatism found in the Shipping Forecast, for instance. In addition to Murphy’s account of translating storms into scores, critic Dave Beech’s sleeve note argues that Rickards’ project is primarily a work of subversive de-skilling – one that highlights the aesthetic biases of skill when set against something culturally ‘neutral’, such as the weather. I would suggest this record articulates something far more primeval; our drive to harness the natural world, and turn ‘nature’ into ‘Nature’. Culture as shelter from the storm."

- Dan Fox, Frieze