Michael Lightborne




SOUND


- Slí na F​í​rinne
- RING ROAD RING
- Sounds of the Projection Box


A/V


- Water Damage
- Concrete Cinema
- The Ignorant Camera / Urban Sensographies
- Extraction
- Adandonware
- Digital Light Processing
- The Future is a Waste of Time


TEXT

 - List of writings and pdfs
- 











Q








RING ROAD RING

(Michael Lightborne, Gruen195, 2020)




Listen to RING ROAD RING on Bandcamp Released on vinyl and digital by Gruenrekorder. 

This album features sound recordings of the low-level vibrations pulsing through the megastructure that is the Coventry Ring Road. Built between the 1950s and 70s, it was a key part of the plan to rebuild Coventry after the devastation of World war II. The Ring Road was intended to keep traffic out of the city centre and form the basis for a radical vision of a modern pedestrian-focussed city. However, politics, economics and the contingencies of history combined to produce a situation in which the plan was compromised in a number of ways. Nowadays, the Ring Road has come to be seen as a misguided Modernist project that ended up deterring pedestrians and killing the city centre. The process of disassembling, mitigating, and repurposing the structure is already under way.

To capture these sounds I used contact microphones attached to the concrete pylons that support the road, at various points around its circumference. I was immediately surprised by how melancholy the ring-road sounds. The first track is a collage of field recordings from around the Ring Road. Most of the subsequent tracks take these recordings as raw material from which to build a series of poetic interpretations of the lifeworld of the Ring Road. The final track adds induction coil recordings of the electromagnetic fields that surround and emanate from the structure, including the flittering fragments of the EM fields dragged around by traffic passing above.

Order the vinyl here and available in Ireland and UK via Juno here. You can listen to the album and purchase the digital and vinyl version on Bandcamp here.




credits

released January 13, 2020

7 Tracks (32′47″)
Vinyl (300 copies)
Order: shop.gruenrekorder.de?full#Gruen_195

This album was produced as part of Sensing the City, an Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project that investigates the urban space of Coventry City (warwick.ac.uk/sensingthecity).

Thanks to: Nicolas Whybrow, Natalie Garrett Brown, Emma Meehan, Carolyn Deby, Nese Tosun, Sarah Shalgosky, Fiona Venables, Rachel Moseley, Pete Ashton, Roland and Lasse at Gruenrekorder, Denise Pigott, and Ezra Gene.

All recordings made by Michael Lightborne in the city of Coventry.

Artwork and photography by Michael Lightborne.

Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder
Germany / 2020 / Gruen 195 / LC 09488




Quotes from selected reviews:



“This is some fascinating music; dark and elegant, quiet and peaceful.” – Franz de Waard, Vital weekly
“Michael Lightborne‘s previous record for this label was the excellent Sounds Of The Projection Box, released in 2018 as a beautifully packaged LP record with plenty of photographic illustrations of his theme. He made documentary recordings of the sounds of projection booths in UK cinemas, but also contextualised the work with his detailed, well-considered annotations and observations. That rigour is much in evidence on today’s record, Ring Road Ring (GRUEN 195). He made recordings of the ring road in Coventry, a structure that was built after the war in the hopes of allowing traffic to bypass the city, so the council could make good on its plan to build a pedestrianised centre. There are numerous concrete pillars supporting this road, and this is where Lightborne attached his microphones to collect his field recordings. These are presented on the record; first as a long (10:53) piece, the title track in fact, which collages and layers a number of the original recordings together into a mini-symphony of grey, droning sounds. There follow a number of shorter pieces, with titles such as ‘Fortran’, ‘Moebius Loop’ and ‘Shepherd Tone’, which use the original recordings but subjected to the imaginative processes of the composer; his aim is “to build a series of poetic interpretations of the lifeworld of the Ring Road”, which I find very poignant. The long track has a compelling, industrial bleakness which is hard to beat, but the shorter “poetic” tracks are just glorious; barely recognisable as traffic sound, what emerges is mostly the sense of constant vibrations and the shifting of inert building materials, transformed by the composer’s art into a form of droning process music.

Michael Lightborne evidently intends a critical side to his work […]; he points out how the Ring Road project failed, and failed the city; “the Ring Road has come to be seen as a misguided Modernist project that ended up deterring pedestrians and killing the city centre.” I can personally testify to this, having spent three years in Coventry in the 1980s; as a pedestrian, I often wondered what was causing this nameless sense of dread and despair in my bones, and the Ring Road could well have been a part of it. Ironically, the project (as shown in Lightborne’s research) was full of optimism at the time, even regarded as futuristic – the design was computer-assisted, hence the Fortran reference, and full of the same spirit of adventure that led our society to build other Brutalist erections, such as the numerous tower blocks that sprung up under the Labour government in the 1960s. Lightborne’s gloomy prognosis was, he found, confirmed as soon as he heard a playback of the field recordings he had made; it sounded “melancholy”. It’s as though the architecture itself was in revolt, protesting the weight of traffic that has been passing over its surfaces for 50 years; the whole LP emerges as a Dantean portrait of a modern urban Hell, a bleak image of futility. How many other such destructive and deleterious town planning projects are there in the UK? We need more sound artists like Lightborne to point out and express these failures, and I would argue the statements are all the more powerful for being expressed as art, instead of 200pp surveyor reports or misguided sociological studies that will never get read.” – Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector / Resonance FM
“Issued in vinyl and digital formats, Lightborne’s thirty-three-minute Ring Road Ring is strongly rooted in a geographical location […]. In every one of these soundscapes, texture and reverberation are paramount. A collage of largely untreated field recordings, the opening track, “Ring Road Ring,” is the longest at eleven minutes as well as the ‘purest.‘ Even so, a vaguely melancholic, even lonely character emerges from the muffled stream and its punctuating clatter, so tangibly, in fact, that Lightborne’s likening of its ‘music‘ to a “lament” begins to seem more than a little plausible. Further to that, when a metronomic clicking pattern surfaces, the grainy material begins to suggest some degraded form of experimental techno, the kind of industrial concoction one could image booming from the bowels of a hazy club at three in the morning. The other tracks build on “Ring Road Ring” by using it as raw material for the creation of so-called “poetic interpretations” of the road. Smothered in gaseous vapours, “Fortran” could be mistaken for an early Basic Channel production or even perhaps some eerie alien transmission captured using broken-down equipment. The sonic character of “Moebius Loop” evokes the image of a figure lurching through a cavernous space, whereas “Shepherd Tone” exudes a rather nightmarish quality in suggesting scrambled voices accessed via seance. If “Ring Cycles” exhibits a stronger electronic character than the others, it’s because Lightborne worked into its combustible assembly induction coil recordings of the electromagnetic fields surrounding and emanating from the structure. Each vinyl side, by the way, includes a locked groove at the end, the gesture fitting for a project whose subject matter operates as a continuous roundabout.” – Textura

Sounds of the Projection Box


(Michael Lightborne, Gruen177, 2020)




Listen to Sounds of the Projection Box on Bandcamp Album released on vinyl and digital by Gruenrekorder

These recordings, made in 2016 and 2017, document the shifting sonic texture of the cinema projection box, as it changes from 35mm to digital projection. By 2014, the majority of UK cinemas had already converted to digital, making many projectionists redundant, and quietly altering the way that cinema works, as both an industry and an experience. Very few cinemas maintain the ability to project 35mm film alongside digital, and it was in some of the remaining, tenacious boxes that I sought the persistent sounds of analogue projection.

The unique space that this album investigates is simultaneously a workshop, an engine room, and an artist’s studio. The projection box is a small room at the back of the cinema auditorium that conceals both the apparatus of the moving image, and the labour of the projectionist, ensuring that both remain invisible, and inaudible, to the cinema-goer.

This album was developed as part of The Projection Project, a research project based in the Film and Television Studies Department at the University of Warwick, which seeks to record and investigate the history of cinema projection in Britain. A special issue of the Journal of British Cinema And Television Studies (Vol 15, No 1, 2018), edited by members of The Projection Project, features a number of articles about the history of British cinema projection and the work of the projectionist in Britain, through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. It includes an article entitled ‚Sounds of the Projection Box: Liner Notes for a Phonographic Method‘, which augments this album, and elaborates upon the theoretical and methodological rationale for the use of sonic field recording as a mode of enquiry.

All of the images that accompany this record were made by Richard Nicholson. Some of them form part of a series of portraits entitled The Projectionists.




credits

released January 8, 2018

All recordings made by Michael Lightborne.
Photography by Richard Nicholson.
Artwork design by Michael Lightborne.

Mastered by Zak Zikis

10 Tracks (43′30″)
Vinyl (500 copies)

projectionproject.warwick.ac.uk
richardnicholson.com

Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder
Germany / 2018 / Gruen 177 / LC 09488 / EAN 4050486119020




Quotes from selected reviews:



“The ethnographic sensory methodology is raised to a model of possible musicality. In our opinion, this Gruenrekorder release must be placed as one of the most interesting albums of the year.” 
– Neural Magazine http://neural.it/2019/02/michael-lightborne-sounds-of-the-projection-box/

“A love letter to cinema, specifically the golden age of human projectionists, Sound of the Projection Box captures sounds that are swiftly becoming extinct; yet by the end, it introduces new sounds that cannot be heard without amplification.  The state of cinema is changing, and with it equipment and personnel.  Lightborne helps us to remember the wonder of the old days, when people could still be surprised by the experience and connected to the person behind the projector.” 
– A Closer Listen Top Ten Field Recordings and Soundscapes 2018. acloserlisten.com/2018/12/16/acl-2018-top-ten-field-recording-soundscape/

“What a great record.  And thank God it’s vinyl, because this is the only way to hear Sounds of the Projection Box, which is at once an homage to antiquated technology, a requiem for days gone by and a reflection of supposed progress. […] Michael Lightborne captures sounds that might soon become extinct, in the same manner as certain physical environments ~ rain forests, barrier reefs ~ might disappear as well. […] As the album unfolds, Lightborne tells a beautiful story in chapter order.  […]  The sounds are incredibly crisp, taking full advantage of the stereo field.  Eventually they discover their own sort of rhythm.

For some, Sounds of the Projection Box will be a trip to the past, a nostalgic keepsake.  For others the album will be a curiosity, a historical artifact.  DJs may find the record an invaluable tool for adding texture to mixes.  Fans of the unusual will find its grooves unpredictable and enthralling.  The release has the potential to build bridges across generations by starting conversations that begin with “Tell me how it was,” and continue with “Is it better now?”  Lightborne seems to conclude that the new era is neither better nor worse; it simply contains its own type of beauty.” 
– Richard Allen, A Closer Listen acloserlisten.com/2018/09/18/michael-lightborne-sounds-of-the-projection-box/

“Lightborne is especially interested in the rhythms and patterns of spinning wheels, the ‘sonic potentials’ of projector operation, the role of the rewind bench… all of these operations necessary to the smooth projection of a film, and mostly kept hidden from the audience.

Speaking of hidden elements… the last track is interesting in that it documents the workings of a modern digital projector, by way of comparison with all the analogue equipment we’ve been hearing up to this point. The workings of this machine are all but impossible to understand; there’s nothing to repair, in the way of broken reels of film; and the only sound it appears to make is a whirring noise, caused by all the fans it needs to keep it cool. Michael Lightborne proves there is however an interesting “inner life” going on inside this box, which he discovered by pointing his electromagnetic coil microphone at its innards.” 
– Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector www.thesoundprojector.com/2019/04/06/projecting-into-the-past/

“Sounds of the Projection Box shows off Michael Lightborne’s ability to craft an entire narrative with a single event.” – Beach Sloth

“If ever a release could be used to argue for the full vinyl presentation, it's Lightborne's. The beautiful photographic images on the foldout sleeve not only do much to enhance one's impression of the project, they also convey the large size of the film reels and projection equipment involved in the projection process. When presented at a large size, the inner sleeve image of a representative booth environment, filled as it is with spools of film and movie adverts, also allows the viewer to better appreciate the rather hermetic world inhabited by the projectionist.” 
– Textura www.textura.org/archives/b/buttner_lightborne_yanagisawa.htm

Concrete Cinema

***ARCHIVE***


This iteration of Concrete Cinema took place in 2022. Included on this page is  an archive of the live website  for the project at the time, accompanied by some photo documentation.

***ARCHIVE***



Love it or hate it, Coventry’s concrete is part of the experience of living in the city. Concrete Cinema is an outdoor projection installation that will jumpstart a conversation around the materials that make up the city, and the kinds of buildings that we want to live in, work in, and look at. The artists below have been commissioned to make moving image works for concrete: films that recognise and interact with the surface on which they are projected.

Concrete Cinema will pop up around Coventry City centre on the following evenings:

Friday, Jan 28
Saturday, Jan 29
Thursday, Feb 3 
Friday, Feb 4

Keep an eye on the Coventry Biennial Twitter and Instagram accounts for details about exactly where and when these guerrilla projections are taking place....


artists.




Laura Dicken is a socially engaged artist and producer based in the Black Country of the West Midlands. She most frequently works with analogue photography and photo montage techniques and has more recently been developing a series of moving image artworks. Laura’s working processes are consistently built upon meaningful connection and conversation. Her portraits are an authentic collaboration made with the hope of co-creating agency and visibility to those she works with.   lauradicken.com




Benedict Drew works across video, sculpture, drawing and painting, and music. He creates large-scale installations, often concerned with ecstatic responses to socio-political anxiety. Solo exhibitions include The Trickle-Down Syndrome, Whitechapel Gallery, London; KAPUT, QUAD, Derby; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; and THE ANTI ECSTATIC MACHINES and Heads May Roll, Matt’s Gallery, London. Drew’s work has been exhibited internationally including at Adelaide Festival, Australia; Lofoten International Arts Festival, Norway; and in Hayward Touring exhibitions British Art Show 8 and Shonky: The Aesthetics of Awkwardness. He has been commissioned to create video works for public spaces including Art on the Underground, London and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea. The installation KAPUT (2015) was acquired by the Arts Council Collection. Since the 1990s Benedict Drew has performed in improvising ensembles, programmed concerts and club nights, and was briefly the director of the cultural charity London Musicians Collective. Drew has released several records on labels including Mana Records and Kaleidoscope, and often collaborates with other artists and musicians. He launched his own label, Thanet Tape Centre, in May 2020 and regularly makes work for radio. Benedict Drew is a Lecturer in Fine Art at Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London. benedictdrew.com




Antonio Roberts is an artist and curator based in Birmingham, UK, working primarily with video, code, and sound. He is critically engaged with the themes surrounding network culture and in his practice explores how technology continues to shape ideas of creation, ownership, and authorship. As a performing visual artist and musician he utilises live coding techniques to demystify technology and reveal its design decisions, limitations, and creative potential. His work has been featured at galleries and festivals including, Furtherfield (2013, 2019), Tate Britain (2014, 2015, 2020), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago (2014), Birmingham Open Media (2015-2016), Jerwood Arts (2016), Whitney Museum of American Art (2017), Green Man Festival (2017), Barbican (2018), Victoria and Albert Museum (2019), Czurles Nelson Gallery (2019), and New Art Exchange (2021). He has curated exhibitions and projects including GLI.TC/H Birmingham (2011), Bring Your Own Beamer (2012, 2013), Stealth (2015), No Copyright Infringement Intended (2017), Copy Paste (2020), and Rules of Engagement (2020). He is part of a-n's Artist Council, is an Artist Advisor for Jerwood Arts and from 2014 - 2019 he was Curator at Vivid Projects where he produced the Black Hole Club artist development programme. hellocatfood.com


Michael Lightborne is an artist based in Birmingham and Cork. He works with video, sound and print, and has exhibited around the UK and internationally, in exhibitions and film festivals. His work engages with questions of landscape, popular culture, memory, and technology. He is currently exploring the viability of ‘psychetecture’, a concept used in the 1980s comic Mister X to describe the psychological effects of architecture and urban forms. He has released two albums on the Gruenrekorder label, His sound work has been played on BBC Radio, NTS Radio, Resonance FM, WFMU, Framework Radio, and numerous other international radio stations. His films have been shown at Cork Film Festival, Glasgow Film Festival, Art Festival at Hay, MOMus Experimental Center for the Arts in Greece, Vivid Projects and Eastside Projects in Birmingham, Flatpack Film Festival, Portland Unknown Film Festival, UCL Urban Laboratory in London, Herbert Gallery in Coventry,  Arquiteturas Film Festival in Lisbon, amongst others. michaellightborne.com




about.


Concrete Cinema is supported by the University of Warwick, and emerges from Warwick research into urban space and the moving image. Funded jointly by the Sustainable Cities GRP (Global Research Priority) and the Arts Impact Fund at the University of Warwick, this project responds directly to research generated by The Projection Project and Sensing the City, both AHRC funded research projects based at Warwick between 2014 and 2020. Concrete Cinema relates specifically to Michael Pigott's work on the moving image and urban space, which can be found in the following outputs:

- Urban Sensographies: The Ignorant Camera collection of film and sound works by Michael Lightborne.
- 'The Ignorant Camera', in Urban Sensographies, ed. Nicolas Whybrow (London and New York: Routledge, 2021).
- Michael Pigott and Richard Wallace, 'A New "Wild West" of Projection' in Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies, ed. Virginia Crisp and Gabriel Menotti (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2020).

Concrete Cinema is part of Coventry Biennial and CineCov - a 12-month programme that will transform the whole of Coventry into a cinema for its year as UK City of Culture. Brought to you by Flatpack on behalf of Film Hub Midlands with support from the BFI using funds from the National Lottery.






Sensing the City research team: Prof Nicolas Whybrow, Dr. Michael Pigott, Dr. Natalie Garrett-Brown, Dr. Emma Meehan, Dr. Carolyn Deby (sirenscrossing)




The Projection Project research team: Prof Charlottel Brunsdon, Dr. Jon Burrows, Dr. Michael Pigott, Dr. Richard Wallace, Dr. Claire Jesson







2022 documentation.



​

Water Damage


Live AV Performance
First commissioned by Ormston House, Limerick, for the Gleo Festival in November 2023. Since performed in variations for Open Ear @ United Arts Club Dublin in December 2023, and for the Dose Weekender in Cork, July 2024.

More info about the original Ormston House performance.

"Michael Lightborne presents Water Damage, an audio-visual trip through the Blackwater valley, exploring the deep entanglement of Irish rivers with agriculture and politics, places and people, health and life, myth and memory.

Expanding on his album Slí na Fírinne, released by The Department of Energy in 2022, Water Damage uses field recordings of the North Cork countryside, processed and recomposed using sampling and synthesis, twisting and warping into techno rhythms and walls of drone accordion.

Water Damage incorporates live visual elements including archival images taken from agricultural journals of the twentieth century, combined with the liquid, chemical and organic materials of the Blackwater valley itself. Phosphate, nitrogen, slurry, petrol, ink, leaves, seeds and dirt drift in and out of the stream of images, while the willfully stupid technique of ‘image composting’ is employed to examine how maps of these lands are made and unmade."

TEXT 

 - Wild Sound: Cinema and the Sonic Environment (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2025)
- 'The Ignorant Camera', in Urban Sensographies, ed. N. Whybrow (Routledge, 2021).
- ‘In conversation: Michael Lightborne with Maud Cotter’ in Maud Cotter: a consequence of – a dappled world (Hugh Lane Gallery, 2021).
- 'A New "Wild West" of Projection' (with Richard Wallace), in Virginia Crisp and Gabriel Menotti (eds), Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies (Oxford University Press: 2020).
- 'Chronotopic Ghosts and Quiet Men: José Luis Guerín's Innisfree' in Journeys On Screen: Theory, ethics and aesthetics, ed. Louis Bayman and Natalia Pinazza (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
- ‘Sounds Of The Projection Box: Liner Notes For A Phonographic Method’ in Journal of British Cinema and Television, Vol. 14, No. 1, Jan 2018
- 'Trapped in the Image: An Interview with Gerard Byrne' in Jielemeguvvie guvvie sjisjnjeli / Film inside an Image (Mead Gallery, 2016).
- 'The Image of Sleep', in Performance Research, Vol. 21, No.1 (2016).
- Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2013).
@michael.lightborne© 2025 Michael Lightborne