00:00 Signal
Hollow Coast is a working index of field recordings — shorelines at the turn of the tide, weather arriving over open ground, the slow breathing of empty rooms and the machines that keep them. No music. Only what was already there.
The page is a single tape. Drag the waveform above, or let it run as you read. Each marker is a recording — its time on the reel, its place, its length.
07:12 Shorelines
54.142°N 3.018°W · 14:11
Forty minutes before the lowest tide of the year. Shingle drains between waves; the whole beach ticks as the water lets go of it. A curlew, twice, far off. Recorded prone, mics a hand's width from the wet stone.
15:48 Weather
54.097°N 3.106°W · 06:30
No shelter for two miles, so the wind has nothing to hold and nothing to break it. It arrives as pressure first, then as a long unbroken sheet of rain on standing water. The loudest thing here is also the emptiest.
24:03 Rooms & machines
53.998°N 2.940°W · 23:40
A brick room the size of a chapel, one motor turning over once a minute to keep the level. Between cycles the room rings — a low, patient note you feel before you hear. I left the recorder running and stood very still until it forgot me.
33:20 Method
Nothing here is sweetened. The work is choosing where to stand, how long to wait, and what to leave in.
Arrive early enough to be boring. Wildlife and weather both ignore a person who has stopped being interesting, which is usually about twenty minutes.
The room is an instrument. A pump house, a stairwell, a culvert — each has a note it wants to hold. The recording is mostly about finding it.
Keep the long takes. The minute before something happens is the recording; the event is just punctuation.
40:00 Studio
Recordings are available for film, installation and broadcast, and the full reels are open for listening by appointment in the studio at Brindle. Tell me the room you are trying to fill.