Mimic hoots & redoubled echoes - Wordsworth + Schwitters' Soundscapes

Concert: Mimic hoots and redoubled echoes: Wordsworth and Schwitters' Lakeland Soundscapes

by Nathaniel Mann and Jamie Castell

A unique avant-garde performance inspired by echoes in the landscape, 'Mimic hoots and redoubled echoes' brings Romantic poetry into collision with radical sound art.

Drawing on the shared Lakeland terrain that links William Wordsworth and Kurt Schwitters, the performance transforms poetry, music, and voice into a volatile acoustic encounter blurring the boundaries between human and nonhuman, text and terrain, memory and resonance.

The sites of Kurt Schwitters' final great artwork and William Wordsworth's family home are located in adjacent valleys. Though emerging from vastly different traditions and time periods, their work resounds across the same landscape with a shared sense of experiment.

Starting from the owl calls made by a boy in a celebrated Wordsworth poem, Mann and Castell will use saxophone, voice and field recordings to refract Wordsworth and Schwitters' sound worlds through improvisation, new technologies and extended musical techniques.

In the process, the performance will layer new reverberations onto the traditions of Romantic poetry and experimental sound as they continue to echo in the enduring acoustic of the Lakes.

Nathaniel Mann

Nathaniel is an experimental composer, performer, and sound designer. His expansive practice bridges music and sound art. He was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2019 and was an Arts Foundation Fellow in 2018. His work Pigeon Whistles (2013) — a flying orchestra of flute-carrying Birmingham Roller pigeons — won the George Butterworth Prize for Composition in 2015. He is one-third of the experimental folk trios Dead Rat Orchestra and Hack Poets Guild, whose acclaimed debut Black Letter Garland (2023) was named one of The Guardian's Folk Albums of the Year. https://hackpoetsguild.com/ www.deadratorchestra.co.uk

Dr Jamie Castell

Jamie is a musician and researcher drawn to the space where sound meets the natural world. He is a Research Fellow at Cardiff University, working on the AHRC-funded international project The Sound of Nature: Soundscapes and Environmental Awareness, 1750–1950 and has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, where he completed a PhD on Wordsworth. He works primarily in jazz and improvised music, playing saxophone and other instruments live and in recorded sessions across the UK and Europe.

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