“Between two series of rocky mountains, lies a plain now heavy with sand, where 100 000 years before a plush, green landscape of freshwater groundwells drew human travellers, passing through on foot, feet wrapped in animal skin, hunting with hand made tools and burying their dead .”
Circular Landscapes’ is an experimental, immersive music series on Sharjah’s most iconic locations; the Sharjah International Airport, Mleiha desert and its archaeological centre. These sites are continual key points of migration and transience in Sharjah’s history; hubs for travellers and for trade. Inspiration for these compositions in sound and image come from the pre-historic communities at Mleiha and the early 20th century charter flights leaving Sharjah Airport. Each of these sonically distinct locations, rich with history and myth serve as materials from which artists Bradley-Weaver create audio-visual, surround sound works; ‘Circular Landscapes’. These unique, improvised musical performances plumb the sounds of daily activities, of architecture and archaeology, from the mountainous and desert landscape at Mleiha and radio aircraft communications at the airport. These are explored for all their dynamic range, and are inspiration for the performance pieces. The artists’ compose using their long-practised techniques of teasing out the unique sonic qualities of an environment or architecture. They combine voices telling stories and recollections of the communities that frequent these landscapes today and yesterday, through a conceptual journey in sight and sound.
When they eventually settled down to build a fortressed palace and stables, trading small effigies of aphrodite for home made coins of gold, they could not have known that at the stony heights above them, where the sand now meets the summits, were millions of year old fossils, their corpses forever engrained in the limestone rock, a record sheet for all time. The frozen imprint of the underwater sea life in a land dominated by forests and dinosaurs. These seabed creatures framed and traced, 66 million years and still the are perfect and intact. These apparently barren ranges, the canopy now, touching the sky over the Mleiha plain, but once the very bottom of an entirely different world, an ocean floor teaming with Jurassic life.”
Extract ‘Circular Landscapes‘
BRADLEY and WEAVER 