Friday 25 August 2017 Production Unit - Why Do The Birds Sing? Year: 2017. Duration: Part 1: 19.51 Part II: 19.42 Why Do The Birds Sing? by Production Unit is a specially commissioned piece for The Friday Shediocast, commemorating the final event of 2017. Its creator, Dave Donnelly aka Production Unit, has composed a piece formed of two long sections rooted both in the gardens themselves and more broadly in our environment. “The piece has a few interweaving themes. First of all, I wanted to find inspiration in the Gardens and was struck by an archive photo showing the phrase 'Why Do The Birds Sing?' It struck a chord for some reason and I started to research why they do it.” “It turns out it's for a few reasons, as far as we can tell. It's primarily to communicate a message to others, and that can be a warning, or to highlight a source of food or shelter, or as courtship. But there's also some evidence that it's done just because it's pleasurable. So I wanted to take some of those ideas and communicate a message that has elements of warning about it, but also, I hope, something productive that provides guidance towards safety and pause for thought. And, of course, it gave me a lot of pleasure to share that message.” “I chose the environment – our (mis)use of natural resources and the fragile nature of our world. So the piece contains snippets of a speech by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, director of the beautiful film Home, where he touches on how irrational we seem – how we know that we have to radically change our course, but “We don't want to believe what we know”. “And at the same time, that environmental message led me on to the sounds of birdsong, so I recorded some blackbirds, thrushes, blue tits and others that I could intersperse with the music. But when I heard them, empathising a bit more with what they could be doing and thinking a bit deeper about the messages they could be carrying, it seemed fitting to weave the recordings rhythmically and melodically, and that went even further when I started to transcribe them, play along with them, and bounce notes of my own off their songs.” “I've always enjoyed remixing – it's so much easier than starting with a blank canvas – so it was as if I was remixing, or jamming with, the birds, all of us singing our own songs in harmony.“And then to return to the Gardens, I wanted to somehow remix the place itself, and the way I found to do that was in its initials, HG. While we usually talk about the musical notes A to G, that's not the case in Germany, where they use ‘H’ to refer to our ‘B’. So HG becomes two long sections, one centred on B and the second on G. I've got perfect pitch so I hear the notes in everything! Car horns, door creaks, birdsong... This was a way to find the notes hidden in the Gardens.” “What I hope I've made is a share a way of understanding the world that places us in it, a call to action, with empathy, wariness, but – and this is important – a little hope too. As Noam Chomsky once said when asked: “What gives me hope? You do.” So while the message could seem bleak, there's hope in the fact people – you – want to listen.” Production Unit is the recording name of Glasgow's Dave Donnelly. A former member of Glasgow’s Numbers collective, he also releases music as Dirty Hope and helps to run the Broken20 label. This piece is the first of a four-part series themed around ecology, social justice, politics and protest and will soon be released on Broken20. His next work will be a collaborative experiment in evolving storytelling and sound art, Líonra: Spun Tales, Tangled Webs at The Dark Outside/Sanctuary in Galloway Dark Skies Park next month. broken20.com/grid sanctuarylab.org
