Concrete Antenna

Runs until 30 June 2016
Monday – Saturday, 10am–5pm

Commissioned by Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop for the opening of the Creative Laboratories, Concrete Antenna is a site-specific sound work created by Tommy Perman, Professor Simon Kirby and Rob St John, which explores the past, present and future of the Workshop’s site.


Sound gathered from audio archives and specially made field recordings rises, falls, breaks apart and splices back together across multiple speakers throughout the 22 metre tall triangular concrete tower. The work evokes the site’s various histories as a blacksmith, a railway siding close to the Newhaven docks and now a thriving creative workshop beside a wildlife rich cycle route.

Using a range of unusual production techniques derived from the tower itself, the recordings – foghorns, train whistles, gas work demolition, birdsong, construction work, wind in fishing boat sails and many more – are slowly reshaped in the piece, coalescing from their original form to something new, musical and celebratory.

The installation responds in subtle ways to the state of the tide at Granton, the prevailing weather conditions, and the movement of visitors in the tower, creating a unique experience for every listener.  In doing so, the tower becomes a concrete antenna, picking up impressions of the imagined sonic memory of the site, which mingle with the natural soundscape trickling in through a periscope-like gap at the top of the building.



Concrete Antenna Album Launch

Simon Kirby | Tommy Perman | Rob St John

Thursday 10 September 2015
6–8pm

Launch Event


Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop is funded by:

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