MAKING A NEW WORLD/VINYLE COULEUR

Description

Effects of the First World War. But this is not an album about the war and it is not, in the traditional sense of the word, an album about remembrance. There are songs about air traffic control and gender reassignment surgery. There are songs about Tiananmen Square and about ultrasound. There are even songs about free allotment and about sanitary pads. The songs stem from a project undertaken by the group for the Imperial War Museum and were first performed at their Salford and London sites in January 2019. The starting point was a document from the IWM collection; an image, from a 1919 publication on ammunition published by the US War Department, was created using the "sound ranging" technique, which uses a set of transducers to capture vibrations from gunfire on the front line. These vibrations were displayed on a graph, similar to a seismograph, where the distances between peaks on different lines could be used to locate enemy armaments. This particular image shows the minute leading up to 11 am on November 11, 1918, and the minute that followed. One minute of oppressive, jerky noise and one minute of near silence.