By Marty Fisk, PhD candidate in Electroacoustic Composition, University of Birmingham
Handsworth Library sits near the centre of the busy Soho Road, and has long been a valuable hub for Handsworth’s large South Asian community. On a fresh December afternoon, True Form Projects returned to the library to present their third outing of SUNO, once again joined by DUNYA’s Raveena Jassal and artist Haseebah Ali.
A selection of records from the collection spanning from the 1960s-1990s were brought over, and it was wonderful to see the immediate impact hearing these had on the people in attendance. Guests were singing along, sharing their memories of the music and how soundtracks intertwined in their lives, and each coming up with their requests of which song to play next!
Accompanying the sounds of the archive, Haseebah led a collage and art-making session exploring the visual art of our collection, helping guests designi and reimagine their own collaged album covers. Check out some of the visual art of the collection.
During the session, I was making spatial-audio recordings of the space for use in my creative research for True Form. The overlapping sounds of music and conversation in Handsworth show one aspect of the archive’s impact in the present; an aural record I felt would be valuable to capture for my own musical collage. Including these elements, alongside direct recordings of vinyl from the archive and extracts from Oral Histories collected by Trueform, helped add a “living” element to the research.
