Dawn Chorus
Marcus Coates
Arnolfini, Bristol
10/07/2007

Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus is a curious mix of an event in which an audience of musicians, new music lovers, live art and experimental film enthusiasts - plus a sizeable gaggle of ornithologists - gather to witness an attempt at recreating the chirps and warbles of the Northumbrian countryside using human vocal talents.

Bioacoustic expert Geoff Sample (and was ever a sound recordist so magnificently named?) knows his birds. He knows whether you’re listening to a robin, or a blackbird doing an impersonation of a robin. He knows the difference between any given number of avian songs, even identifying vocal tics that distinguish one specific chiffchaff from another. Apparently birds have regional dialect: “It’s like the difference between Sunderland where they’ll say makkem and takkem, and Newcastle, where it’s maek ‘em and taek ‘em,” he burbles, happily.

Sample is collaborator, principle aide and - by the looks of things - something of a guru to Marcus Coates, the originator of Dawn Chorus and an artist concerned for many years with the natural world and its array of alien sensory experiences. His work juxtaposes human characteristics against the behaviours and traits of other species, a notable example being the film Out Of Season which plonks a lone Chelsea supporter in the midst of a leafy bucolic landscape, belting out terrace chants in an incongruous display of bravado that is, at the same time, completely in keeping with the territorial aspects of the birdsong chittering about him.

Coates’ ongoing fascination with the dynamics and resonances of birdsong has led to him and Sample recording 576 hours of the stuff, hiding microphones in trees, under bushes and between rocks in Bamburgh, Northumberland so as to accurately isolate the many voices that mass in the hours around dawn. And subsequently, this evening at Arnolfini - part performance lecture, part conversation, part film screening – has at its heart a fascinating musical exercise in which a small choir of homo sapiens is assembled to perform a ‘live’ dawn chorus; reciting selected recordings from Coates and Sample’s archive which have been pitched down to the human vocal scale. A video made of their performance is then sped up digitally to mimic the incredible dexterities of bird voice.

In presentation as well as content it’s a fascinating example of the merging of science and art as well as the two disciplines’ occasional clash of principle. Coates often draws complex metaphors from the raw facts of the natural world whilst Sample advises caution to anyone appropriating tricky concepts of neuroscience and animal behaviour for creative ends; such as idly speculating upon why, exactly, birds bother to sing in the first place. He reveals that in one species ovaries only form in the female if they are subjected to song from their male counterparts. “So the song has an actual biological purpose?” asks Coates, and with a tiny grimace Samples’ face says: “Contentious.”

The actual choral performance itself is the highlight. After a short laptop-based demonstration of how birdsong - when undercranked by a factor of about 16 – can become whalesong or the sound of children in a playground, several vocalists take to the stage and, listening carefully to playback through individual headphones, croon out the slowed-down tones of greenfinches, goldfinches, wrens and swallows. The differences in avian identities when placed in a very human context are remarkably apparent: some birds are minimalist, repetitive, their ranges falling within a set scale. The opposite extreme is represented by species such as the Blackcup (performed as part of Coates’ film installation by singer-songwriter Rasha Shaheen) its grandstanding tune a dazzling marathon of microtones resonant of the New Complexity, an avant garde cadenza amongst the trees. Meanwhile, the machine gun chirps of the Wren - performed by Meena Reetoraz-Yeomans - if transposed to the human metabolism would require diaphragm muscles with the speed and impact of a pneumatic drill. Ben Owen, making like a Swallow, has perhaps the widest demand in tonal range, requiring him to squeeze out some gutteral croaks redolent of a hungover Tom Waits one second before sighing gently in the upper registers like Stina Nordenstam the next.

Over 15 minutes a specific arrangement unfolds, with great care taken to reproduce the precise interactions of particular species. It turns out that the authentic dawn chorus has what amounts to a loose score, with certain birds making way for others, duetting, waiting their turn in a semi-improvisatory arrangement. The final result is compressed into less than a minute of footage, so fast we get to see it three times, with the performers taking on some physical tics and mannerisms weirdly evocative of their feathered avatars. It’s oddly affecting, disconcerting and extremely funny, all in one high-speed flash.

Tim Atack

Marcus Coates is an artist and filmmaker exhibiting nationally and internationally. An extract from Dawn Chorus can be seen at http://arts.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1997689,00.html

Geoff Sample: http://www.wildsong.co.uk/