​A Grimoire of Silence was commissioned in 2020 by The Onassis Foundation as part of their Radiophonics Series. 

The work is an exploration of ideas around sound, silence, listening, and public ritual couched in an unstable narrative. The narrative centers ostensibly on an investigation of public one-minute silences in which the protagonist feels cheated due to the inconsistent duration of the so-called silences. Over time the central figure’s mental health deteriorates as he attempts to enter the silences and manipulate recordings from within, attracting the disapproval of an authoritarian and puritanical state. Out of this emerges a theory of the recording chain as a kind of sympathetic magic, as discussed by Marcel Mauss (in “A General Theory of Magic”).

Creator: James Wyness
Additional voices: Claire Watson
Duration: 33΄10΄΄

My original idea for A Grimoire of Silence was based around the story of an individual who feels cheated by the ritual of one-minute silences – they’re either too short or too long. He decides to get inside them, using an advanced technology, to find out more. The subject is trying to find some silence in his own life but is constantly irritated by everyday domestic sonic intrusions. In examining this theme, the work explores the ambiguity of radio’s use of foley, our perception of internal and external spaces, the noises and silences of the body and of the mind. Along the way the piece offers a measured critique of theories of silence, for example those of John Cage and the endless arcane and overwrought papers issuing from the academic industry known as ‘Sound Studies’ in its attempts to appropriate the discourse around sound and silence. At the discursive center of the work is a serious investigation of the notion that the recording chain, from microphone to loudspeaker, is in fact a form of sympathetic magic, as analyzed and described in Marcel Mauss’ seminal study ‘A General Theory of Magic.’ Such a theoretical position takes account of the anthropological foundations of our emotional and socially constructed responses to audio recordings.

Sounds from various interiors, field recordings from outdoor locations and carefully composed layers of processed electroacoustic sound created from recorded material make up the non-vocal fabric of the piece. The vocal material is carefully layered and at times algorithmically randomized into dense textural clusters. Tape recordings are layered upon other recordings, these then layered further with commentary. I also decided to include found dictaphone recordings of my recently deceased parents. With these and other recordings in the work I sought to allude to the voices of the dead, a strong theme in historical radiophonic discourse.

The piece evolved into an exploration of these ideas alongside the notion of the state and the Academy taking control of artistic and representational activities. For this I included a second voice, that of a woman, spoken by Clare Watson, who interrogates the (silent) subject and thereby reveals the workings of a quasi-totalitarian regime, asking pertinent questions around the ownership of representations of reality, who is allowed to represent what? Over time the subject is psychologically damaged by the experience.

The work relies heavily on recorded and composed sound: field recordings, dense sound streams and electronically generated sound. The ’timeline’ is fragile – the listener will piece together the narrative from a circular rather than linear trajectory. Finally, the piece explores dislocation, transmission, disarticulation, metamorphosis, and mutation, again important elements throughout the history of experimental radio.