A Large Slow River

Tracklist

1

A Large Slow River

18:01

Notes

Part fiction, part memory, part personal experience... Janet Cardiff invites you to borrow an iPod at the front desk and go for a stroll in Gairloch Gardens. In a route that begins in the gallery, she will take you through the gardens on a journey that is intellectually absorbing and filled with revealing surprises. As in all of her audio walks, the senses mesh with things remembered and experienced.

Once you have the headset on, you will recognize that Cardiff's voice has a capacity for providing intimacy and companionship, as she entwines you in a narrative that is about a place remembered, longings and imaginings. Using audio effects, previously recorded sounds, and her own voice, her presence is implied through sound. "Try to follow the sound of my steps so that we can stay together," she tells us at the beginning of the walk. Using special sound technology that produces a 3-D reproduction of sounds to uncanny effect, her recording blends with the live ambient ones, creating a dislocating uncertainty – is that really a crow squaking overhead, or the recording? Our attention is fixed on listening and imagining. Synchronistic events also play with our understanding of reality as events and scenes described on her CD coincidentally come together in the physical world.