An Evening Symphony, with Barbed Wire

1: Swifts, motorbikes, barbed wire
2: Holloway, midden, gorse
3: Freedom, farming, blackbirds

A Sound Walk podcast conversation between artist Volkhardt Müller and Emma Welton, in three movements of approx 30 minutes each.

Many of Emma’s Exeter Sound Walks have brought her to the city’s limits which for various reasons we can’t or don’t transgress. Volkhardt is an Exeter based multidisciplinary artist with a professional interest in landscape, how people shape it and how it shapes people. They walked the City Edge, one evening in May. Commissioned by Art Work Exeter for Art Week Exeter 2022.

Do you tune into the sounds of your environment when you’re out and about? They are neverending music composed, both deliberately and accidentally, by humans and more than humans together.

Emma Welton is a violinist, composer and sound artist living in Exeter, a small city in South West England. She has mapped Sound Walks in her neighbourhood over the course of a year, mostly alone, but sometimes with other listeners. Many of these walks have brought her to the city’s limits which for various reasons we can’t or don’t transgress. She invited artist Volkhardt Müller to walk the City Edge with her, one evening in May.

Volkhardt is an Exeter based multidisciplinary artist with a professional interest in landscape, how people shape it and how it shapes people. He grew up in Swabian Jura in Southern Germany, and has lived in Exeter with his family for twenty years.

He is a member of artist collective Bind Ditch, and an experienced socially engaged practitioner. Volkhardt has produced a rich and multi-award-winning body of work in response to the city of Exeter. He is also a craftsman and a translator of popular science books.

Over these three podcasts Volkhardt and Emma walk from the bottom of the Exe valley to the top of a hill, listening all the while. You can think of the podcasts as three movements of a symphony taking place at the end of a day, whose music moves not only through time, but also space.

They recorded their conversation and the sounds around them with binaural microphones so if you listen through headphones you hear the sounds all around you.

The work is also available on Devonstream Radio, on fixed and unpredictable rotation.