Where the Paths End

The composition of Where the Paths End occupied me for about a year between August 2022 and July 2023. As a result it encompasses many different concepts and processes. On the surface, the piece has four different manifestations. It exists as a work to be performed in concert by musicians, who are performing in tandem with, and responding to, location recordings from the three different cities of Edinburgh, Birmingham, and London. It also exists as three different soundwalks on the Echoes app in the three aforementioned cities. Each soundwalk should take about 40 - 50 minutes to experience, and they are located in areas of cultural importance within reasonable walking distance of the venues where this piece was first performed. Digging a little deeper, Where the Paths End, perhaps tries to exhibit three different but related things. Through the presentation of environmental sound in both the performance and on the soundwalks, it attempts to offer a record of the sound of three different cities in the early part of 2023. We often have visual records of cities through photographs, paintings etc, but we don’t have too many sonic records. What became apparent making these recordings is how loud our cities are, and how much of our audio space is given over to the combustion engine and other anthropophonic sounds. In the summer of 2023, we are firmly witnessing the devastating effects of the Anthropocene, and my hope is that in the years following this piece’s initial performances, we hear a gradual quietening of our cityscapes, until maybe one day people will not believe our habitat was so loud.