Common Grave: LIVE Broadcast II 2025

Common Grave: LIVE Broadcast II 2025 Audio: Abney Park Cemetery Ground The second in the Ecstatic Rot LIVE broadcast series by Michelle Atherton conducted from Abney Park cemetery, as part of REVEIL 2024: 11th World Dawn Chorus Day, working alongside Soundcamp and 160 international artists. The live audio stream followed the sound of the dawn chorus as the sun broke across the globe for a period of 24hrs. The Common Grave broadcast was made from one of the many common graves located across Abney Park Cemetery, one of the Magnificent Seven garden cemeteries of London. The park acts as a cemetery, urban woodland memorial park and local Nature Reserve, managed by the Borough of Hackney and Abney Park Trust. Originally Abney Park was a historic parkland in the Borough of Hackney created in the early C18th over 31 acres, now part of inner London. In 1840 it became a non-denominated garden cemetery (the first in Europe to have no dividing lines between burial plots for people of different faiths), a semi-public park with arboretum and educational institute. The broadcast is live from just one of the many common graves at Abney Park Cemetery. To date at least 175 common grave sites have been discovered by ‘Abney Unearthed’. A volunteer run project remapping the cemetery funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund to add missing information to the burial records and research the life-stories of some of the almost 200,000 people interred here. They are still in the process of determining the overall number of common graves on the site. The common grave audio stream combined noises from below and above ground, via contact mics, kitchen skewers and a small amplifier, as the urban dawn chorus self-mixed with early morning transport systems and underground sounds. These subterranean stirrings might include the clicks of root-munching larvae, rustling worms as they crawl through tunnels, plant roots taking up water & moving past soil and beetles communicating with each other. The sources of these micro sounds are difficult to identify to the untrained ear and often remain rather enigmatic. The stream is a sequel to Michelle’s stream from last year from Eden Valley Natural Woodland Burial site. It relates to Michelle’s larger project titled Ecstatic ROT exploring our relationships with transience, decomposition and re-composition as more-than-human activity. The project is funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund supporting Arts Council England. Common Grave LIVE Boradcast: REVEIL: 11th World Dawn Chorus Day http://streams.soundtent.org/2024/streams/utc1_-b0a61a79-4996-4706-8cc6-53fe3b1fde4f The broadcast is part of the research project ‘Ecstatic Rot’ investigating relationships with transience, decomposition and re-composition as more-than-human activities. The work involves finding experimental ways to explore ephemera: the loss and flows of materialities, including cycles of transformation across species and substances. Alighting on those things and actions that challenge simplistic divisions between what might be identified as living and non-living.