Abstract
Audio archives are a unique tool that have helped geographers further their spatial analyses of the world. Through listening to voices from the past, the historical geographies of places are revealed and can, then, be used to better understand the numerous narratives that shape a location. But what happens if we take these recordings and reinterpret them, using an artistic lens? Can we create fresh and alternative ways of displaying and doing cultural geography? In this short essay, I demonstrate how I used selected audio archives which discussed the formative years of the life of Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, to create a video map which combines past and present representations of the city of Swansea, Wales, to reimagine the archives for a 21st-century audience. By doing so, I reflect on how when combined with artistic methods, audio archives can be a vital tool for mapping new and innovative understandings of place.
Introduction: journeying through sound, space, and a sullen art
How can we use audio archives to create artistic maps which combine both past and present narratives of people and places and reimagine these archives in contemporary ways? The short film that is the subject of this essay is my attempt at doing just this. In 2020, I and other artists were commissioned by the National Library of Wales to listen through selected audio archives and use them to compose a musical piece. There were no restrictions as to what this musical piece could be. We had to listen to hours of audio, choose what we wanted to use, and then create something. The selected pieces we were asked to review were of varied content and included interviews from different time periods, all with a Welsh connection.
Being from Swansea, a coastal city in South Wales and the birthplace of world-renowned poet, Dylan Thomas, when I heard the selection of clips which included interviews with his family and friends talking about their formative years spent with Thomas, immediately, the places they were discussing stood out for me. As I listened to the interviews, I could relate to and visualize the streets, parks, buildings and landscapes they discussed. Although some 80 years have passed between the Swansea they described and the Swansea that is familiar to me, exploring the topography of Dylan Thomas’s Swansea, as recalled by his friends and family, and matching it with my own spatial relationship with the place I call home quickly became the focus of my piece. I wanted to discover how I could use an artistic approach to map these oral histories on top of a contemporary visualization of Swansea.
What began as a journey through the audio archives became a process of personal and artistic discovery, exploring my own personal geographies as much as those of Dylan Thomas. The final piece, ‘These Streets’, combines the original audio interviews and archival film footage, with new footage and music, filmed and composed by me. Later in this essay, I discuss the process of producing this short film, but for now, here is what I created. https://vimeo.com/426508265
To begin at the beginning: the process of listening and being present
I did not know which audio clips I would be given, so the first steps involved listening to those pieces chosen by the National Library of Wales. The clips sent were an eclectic mix, including 37 tapes of conversations with early migrants from Wales to Patagonia and Canada, a 1916 speech from the Right. Honourable David Lloyd George addressing the National Welsh language cultural festival, the Eisteddfod, 2002–3 interviews with retired Forestry Commission workers in Wales, various interviews with members of the public created by Ceredigion Library during the 1960s and 1970s, a collection of addresses by various individuals involved in the media industry of the Ceredigion Media Society, and interviews between journalist Colin Edwards and Dylan Thomas’s family and friends during the 1960s.
I put on my headphones, pressed play, and embraced this unique opportunity to be present with voices from the past.
There is an irreplaceable intimacy that comes with listening to audio archives, and as I sat at my desk, I was privileged to feel as if I were in the room with those people being interviewed as they shared moments of joy, sadness, death, loss, love, excitement and nostalgia. It is important to note here that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I was unable to visit the archives at the National Library of Wales and, instead, was sent the digital audio files to listen to at home. Listening to audio archives outside a museum or Library setting poses interesting questions regarding how the surroundings in which we listen to archives can impact the aural experience. Being at home without the time constraints I would have encountered at a Library certainly meant that the environment I was listening to these clips in was more relaxed and comfortable. I could listen and then relisten to them at my own pace and didn’t have to worry about when my time was up. But, having so much time to listen to them at home also meant more distractions around the house to break my concentration; thus, how I listened to the clips was far more fragmented than had I done so within confined settings.
Although my listening experience was certainly shaped by living through and in a global pandemic, once I had my headphones on, I was in a sonic vacuum. Me, the recordings, and my thoughts. Because there was only sound on which to focus, I had to rely less on other sensuous cues and had to work harder with my imagination. The process of listening emphasizes how sound permits new ways to engage with geography apart from what we see, opening opportunities for working with data beyond the visual. 1 Thus, rather than being a static artefact to be stored and forgotten, audio archives become dynamic entities which allow for a ‘re-performance of traces from the past’, where we can feel as though we are there, hearing words spoken for the very first time. 2
The process of listening was truly rewarding, and many of the clips were very moving. However, because the National Library of Wales had sent me such a vast array of audio to choose from, I quickly realized I could not spend too much time listening thoroughly to everything and so had to somehow narrow down a selection to be the inspiration of my piece. To make the decision on what to use, I relied upon my own creative instinct, and over time, it became apparent to me that there were some audio clips I had no desire to work with, either because I lost interest when listening to them or because I felt I did not want to do anything with them.
The process of deciding what clips to use got me thinking about the personal geographies of inspiration and creation and that how the seeds of an idea develop is shaped by our own identities, desires, motivations and experiences. A personal connection drew me to the clips about Dylan Thomas’s friends discussing their childhood in Swansea. As a musician, film maker and sound artist, I spend much time in my work negotiating what a sense of place means to me; thus, an opportunity to use the sound archives describing where I grow up felt like a natural fit. Was this decision pre-determined by my own biases? Was I always going to choose these clips, even though going into the project, I had no idea what they would be? These questions are impossible to answer, but it is worth noting that the choices we make when we want to create something, be it a piece of art or an academic article, will always be influenced by our subjectivities, interests, and those little sparks of ineffable inspiration.
The pieces I chose were from the Colin Edwards collection. Colin Edwards was a Welsh journalist who spent much of his life in California, and during the 1960s, he recorded a set of interviews with friends, family, and acquaintances of Dylan Thomas. 3 In these recordings, the subjects reminisce about Dylan, his character, his work, relationships, and family background. In each interview, participants gave detailed accounts of not only their relationship with Dylan but also the places in which those relationships were forged. As they recalled these accounts, I was able to visualize many of these familiar places mentioned, seeing them from a completely new perspective. But how could I extend the meaning and reach of these archives beyond the audio to a wider audience? Here is where the idea for an artistic map began to develop.
These Streets – mapping the moments that matter
In her book on alternative maps, Katherine Harmon states that maps’ potential lie in how they can be a ‘vehicle for the imagination’. As she stresses, 4
part of what fascinates us when looking at a map is inhabiting the mind of its maker, considering that particular terrain of imagination overlaid with those unique contour lines of experience. If I had mapped that landscape, we ask ourselves, what would have I chosen to show, and how would I have shown it. The coded visual language of maps is one we all know, but in making maps of our worlds we each have our own dialect.
Thus, I wanted to create a map which was more than just taking the audience from point A to point B and which would take the spatial relationships of Dylan’s Swansea and interpret them through my own eyes. When analyzing the role of the Shantytown in Jamaican reggae music, Sarah Daynes argues that the articulation of places in artists’ work highlights a certain ‘symbolic topography’ of meaning in their lives. 5 Thus, I wanted to take the symbolic topography from the descriptions given by Dylan’s friends and give them my own voice. In what remains of this essay, I do not give a comprehensive account of my creative process because I want you, the reader, to use your own imagination when watching the piece. I do, however, give a small commentary below on some aspects which I believe are worth pointing out. I suggest re-watching the piece with these notes in mind.
00:00 – 1:00
We begin with the voice of Colin Edwards introducing the first interviewee, Alfred Janes, who was himself a prominent artist. As Janes recalls the first time he met Dylan, we see footage projected onto me to replicate the old film projectors, a nod to the 1930s cinema of Dylan’s era. The first street we see is Cwmdonkin Drive, where Dylan’s childhood home is located and where he did much of his early writing. We, then, begin to move through the streets of Dylan’s Swansea with footage I filmed from my car. This car footage is used throughout the piece to help visualize many of the streets the interviewees discuss, but in their modern context. Mobility is also utilized to symbolize the passing of time and to juxtapose the past and present (i.e. what we are hearing in interviews from the 1960s and what we are seeing in contemporary Swansea).
Alfred Janes, then, mentions the house of Dan Jones on ‘Eversley Road’, where they spent much of their youth playing music together. As we drive through the streets of Dylan’s childhood, we see the modern street signs overlaid on the screen. Showing the street signs as I drove through the mentioned places was important to include throughout the piece, as a reference to a more traditional map.
For the music, I wanted to produce something which complemented the footage’s night-time aesthetic. I filmed at night to emphasize that we were listening to the voices of ghosts, like the ghosts that haunt ‘Under Milk Wood’, Dylan’s most famous play. I used operatic vocal samples to create a haunting atmosphere and a driving beat to echo the movement of the car footage. Although elements of the music change throughout, the beat and mood are constant, keeping the piece moving at a consistent pace.
1:03 – 1:22
Here, I sing lyrics that I wrote to represent the process of me listening to the archives and interpreting what Alfred James is saying about the Uplands, the area where Dylan grew up and where much of the first part of footage was filmed.
‘These streets have voices these ghosts are ours, all of your spoken stories etched in our scars, mountains of concrete, familiar ways, our paths connect our memories to these upland days’
1:23 – 2:56
We continue with Alfred Janes describing how he, Dylan, and their friends bonded through the creation of music and its importance as a creative outlet. A sense of place mattered to how Dylan and his friends negotiated their youth because the descriptions in the interviews revolve around locations, streets, and houses. To emphasize how the streets played an integral role as an arena where their creativity was played out, we continue to snake through different parts of Swansea in the Mount Pleasant area close to where Dylan attended the Swansea Grammar school and would walk as a young man with his friends.
2:56 – 3:15
‘These streets were ours’.
This line is both an expression of the freedom of youth represented in the interviews and a reflection on my own relationship as a teenager exploring the streets of Swansea.
3:15 – 5:39
We next hear Ethel Ross discussing how she met Dylan at the little theater in the Mumbles, the fishing village at the far end sweep of Swansea Bay. Here, I contrast my footage with old archival footage of the Mumbles tram, the Lighthouse, and Oystermouth Castle. She then takes us back toward the city center, as she describes various hangouts and important spaces of social interaction. She emphasizes the street’s role as a place of cultural transaction when stating, ‘I would have known him on the street as a public figure’. She also mentions the importance of Alfred’s studio on College Street and the Kardomah Cafe on Castle Street, revealing the gendered spatial politics of the time as ‘the women dared to go upstairs’.
5:39 – 6:38
Here, I reflect on the whole process of creating the piece and how the passing of time has changed Swansea, yet how yesterday’s Swansea still feels familiar to me. What is clear from the interviews is that the act of reminiscing is a very spatial act, with all interviewees relying on their own navigations of personal place to map the memories and moments that mattered to them and their early lives with Dylan Thomas. For this section, then, it was important for me to press my own history upon the piece as I reflected on my own personal geographies and so included footage of the once-bustling Swansea docks where my great-great grandfather was a shipwright. I also express how the landscape that has shaped Dylan’s spatial relationship with Swansea has shaped me and my own history with the following words: ‘From the bay to bible black bitumen, this isolation breed familiarity,
Cobbled together on constitution hill, we watch your flesh and veins exposed
Your contradictions bare for all to see.
You hold our griefs in your arms, protecting us from cold winds that spill over from the docks
This city, once a town in your days
Is where hills meets city and city meets sea
These streets, the canvas of your imagination
Are the cinema of our society’.
6:39 – 7:24
We finish with one final sweep through the Swansea streets and end up on Townhill, over-looking the city. This location is important because it would have been a vantage point to see much of Swansea which was destroyed during the Second World War blitz, immortalized in Dylan’s poem ‘return journey’.
Audio archives: the aural architecture of undiscovered places
In this article, I have reflected on creating my piece ‘These Streets’ and given a brief insight into how I took audio archives and reused, reimagined, and manipulated them to create something new. There were many outcomes from creating this piece. For the National Library of Wales, I produced a tangible contribution toward their Unlocking Our Sound Heritage initiative (a project to digitally preserve rare and unique sound recordings) and provided an alternative tool for sharing and engaging with the public about how we can uncover and use audio archives.
For myself, the project was a personal journey of discovery of my home city and its most famous son. It helped me further understand the local history of where I grew up and gave new meaning to familiar places. Since creating this piece, when I now walk these streets, I do so with a new historical geo-vocabulary and a deeper connection to my own, and my families’, personal and historical geographies with the city. Listening to these stories has also emphasized how geography matters, not only to geographers, but also to everyday people, as interviewees used their personal maps of the city to remember their relationships with Dylan Thomas, their youth, and the places they made their own. Where possible, I encourage everyone, from school children to residents in care homes, to have access to their local audio archives to develop better spatial understandings of the streets they live and for resources to be provided so that anyone with the confidence to do so can create something from sound archives, to see how it impacts their relationships with their home.
Finally, for geographers, ‘These Streets’ highlights what is possible when combining audio archives with artistic methods to stretch the possibilities of not only what maps can be, but also how we do and display geographic knowledge. Cultural geography, more than any other sub-discipline in human geography, allows for the experimentation of artistic creativity. Experimentation allows for exploration, and if academics are serious about extending the utility of academic knowledge beyond academia, then artistic and creative geographies must play a central role in all sub-disciplines of human geography, not just the cultural.
Footnotes
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This commission is part of a wider initiative called Unlocking Our Sound Heritage, which is a UK-based 5-year project led by the British Library and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to digitally preserve rare and unique sound recordings. As well as the National Library of Wales, nine other institutions were chosen as hubs: National Museums Northern Ireland Archives + Manchester, Norfolk Record Office, National Library of Scotland, University of Leicester, The Keep in Brighton, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, National Library of Wales, London Metropolitan Archives and Bristol Culture.
