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Sound Water Beat / Earworms

Sound Water Beat and Earworms were commissioned and funded by Holy Hiatus and PLaCE (UWE) as part of Holy Hiatus, a series of multi-disciplinary, impermanent, place-sensitive public art events in Cardigan West Wales (May 2008), exploring themes of ritual, community and place (www.holyhiatus.co.uk/archive2008.html). The one-off live event Sound Water Beat transformed a public swimming pool into a theatrical stage for a playful, choreographed interaction between two swimmers and two singers. The sound score was composed and performed in response to the movements of the swimmers. As a result of this, Buchheim was awarded a ‘Good Ideas Award’ grant from Safle, Public Art Wales, to develop Earworms, a sound installation placed underwater inside the community pool for two months (April-May 2009). Short extracts of well-known songs performed by amateur singers for the Song Archive Project were relayed so that they could only be heard underwater by swimmers.

Both commissions drew upon and contributed to the wider project’s exploration of liminal or threshold states (in this case underwater) the ability to draw audiences into different, and often unexpected experiences of place through ritual, generating a sense of community, as proposed by anthropologist Victor Turner. Holy Hiatus was accompanied by a series of interlinked events, an international symposium (2010), screenings and workshops.

Both of Buchheim’s works were discussed in the symposium and a book about the project, Ruth Jones (ed.) Holy Hiatus: Ritual and Community in Public Art (Cardigan: Parthian, 2010), with a specific essay by Elizabeth Mahoney. Earworms was reviewed in the Guardian (5 May 2009) and on the television programme Sioe Gelf on S4C (14 May 2009). Sound Water Beat was nominated for inclusion on Public Realm (one of eleven featured projects in 2008/9) and reviewed by Rob Lowe in Axis (2 June 2008).