Beacon Tower Sound Commission: This is Moth Death: Timothea Armour

We are delighted to announce that This Is Moth Death by Timothea Armour, the first of four new audio works commissioned for our Beacon Tower, is now live! The work is looping daily 11-5 and is sited in the Beacon Tower and can be accessed without booking.

This is Moth Death takes the form of a radio drama set in a pub, this 24 minute audio work dramatises the ecology that surrounds The Beacon tower by finding parallels between their nocturnal life led in liminal urban spaces and the music, nightlife and accompanying subcultures that do the same; simultaneously thriving and constantly under threat from capital and redevelopment.

The audience are eavesdropping on the conversation at a nearby table where a band is having a post-rehearsal pint. All of the band members are bats.

You can download a transcript of the work and a map of  highlighting the pubs and bat activity of the local area here: mothdeathmap

Timothea Armour is an artist, writer (and bartender) living in Leith. She is interested in the ways in which social lives and networks of support can be documented in art and through writing and informal or amateur forms of knowledge and networks of distribution – anecdote, music fandom, field recording.

This work is a further exploration of the themes and ideas developed in The Neighbours are Bats, an ongoing collaboration between Timothea Armour, Esme Armour and Yasmine Akamune-Miles.

The Beacon Tower Commissions

This is the first of four new sound commissions for The Beacon Tower to run until April 2022. It is one strand of a wider programme of public commissions designed to provide audiences with an unexpected and thought provoking encounter with art as they go about their daily lives.

Timothea Armour will be followed by; Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha in July, whose commission will explore the politics of gardens, dream gardens, and the intersection between the garden and the city. In October Raheel Khan will present his new commission. He is currently connecting with the Migrant community of Edinburgh, inviting participants to create a personal sonic diary of the city through sound recordings of places they visit, perhaps their daily walk or locations of fond memories. The programme will culminate in January 2022 with the opening of Feronia Wennborg’s work, a poly-vocal audio installation that explores nonverbal expressions of the voice in the context of domesticity and of friendship.

Alaya Ang and Hussein Mitha are artists based in Glasgow who have a shared interest in gardens and decolonization. In their artistic investigation, ‘Plotting (against) the Garden’, they are working through research and with groups of people to find ways of unearthing communal plant knowledge and creating other systems of meaning through dreaming and imaginative practices of gardening.

Raheel Khan is a Sound Artist and Musician originally born in Nottingham and now based in Manchester (UK). His work explores notions of heritage, society and the inertia of cultural progression. Raheel combines field recordings, fragmented synthetic textures and piano compositions often creating pieces with both personal memories and collective consciousness. His work dances between the private and public spheres creating an intimate archive of abstract social commentary.

Feronia Wennborg is an artist and musician based in Glasgow, working with performance, installation and audio, often in close collaboration with others. Her work is based in a process of recording and digital transformation, collecting traces of intimacy and friendship. Feronia is part of the duo soft tissue together with Simon Weins and is currently a committee member at Market Gallery.

Image credits:

Top: Bat Sketch, Timothea Armour, 2020

Below

Top left: Screenshot 2021-02-15 at 23.59.21, Alaya Ang

Top right: A small pause to unfold, performance,  Feronia Wennborg, 2019. Photo: David Excoffier

Bottom Left: Raheel Khan

Bottom right: Weeds, Hussein Mitha, 2019

The Beacon Tower Commission programme has been made possible by the Cultural Organisations and Venues Recovery Fund and with the ongoing support of