Master Rock on BBC Radio
Maria Fusco writes for three voices in Master Rock, a performance originally transmitted on BBC Radio and now available online.
For those who weren’t lucky enough to experience Maria Fusco’s Master Rock being performed live inside the hollow core of Ben Cruachan mountain, clicking on the digital radio and tuning in provides an alternative means of encountering her work.
Requiring the removal of 220,000 cubic meters of hard granite rock, the construction of Cruachan power station is a great feat of engineering. Yet rather than celebrating this grand human achievement, this subtly shifts the focus via three voices onto the nitty-gritty interaction between human body and rock face.
Drilling and blasting, drilling and blasting, the first voice is the staccato granite-rasp of the tunnel labourer. His prosaic description of harsh repetitive labour against rock is only undercut by distant shattering explosions, a weighty sonorous thrumming and a brittle, high-pitched fracturing sound. This last sound must belong to the rock’s voice, an ambient other, personified by crackling electrostatic feedback and likened to ‘bone, decomposed rock, bone’.
Elizabeth Falconer’s mural sits aloof from this dirty chaotic soundscape. Smooth, proclamatory, leaden and heavy in its delivery, the mural tells the story of the power station through idiosyncratic reference to Gaelic folklore, Celtic crosses and electrification iconography. Her reading in its detachment marks out a secondary space that is only partially present within the chambered rock. Often words and sound, music and noise, are indecipherable from one another, like seeing only the white paper of a page of printed text.
Sound forms space; the tongue and skull of the speaker resonate together, the voice and the cave are mutually determining. Then they collapse into one another, just as the analogue audio signal is digitised below ground, compressed and released for transmission above ground, where it enters the radio antenna to reform as an echo in the room.
Master Rock was commissioned as part of a wider collaboration between Art Angel and BBC Radio4, and will be available online til 17 November