SURROUND ME

MEDIA RELEASE COURTESY OF: Artangel

Various locations through the City of London
Saturdays & Sundays, 9 October 2010 – 2 January 2011

Every day of the working week, the City of London is alive to the sounds of trade, commerce and traffic. At the weekends quiet descends on the offices, squares and streets of the City, broken by the occasional sound of cars and the pealing of church bells.

The quietness of the City has inspired SURROUND ME, Susan Philipsz’s first commission in London, a constellation of sound installations in different spaces across the City. Philipsz’s voice resonates through the empty streets around the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange, across Modernist high-walks and medieval alleyways and along the banks of the River Thames.

The experience of the City at the weekend returns the pedestrian to the human scale and soundscape of the city in pre-industrial times. Intrigued by the pronounced role the voice would have had in the early modern city, Philipsz has drawn material for SURROUND ME from a large body of late 16th and early 17th century English popular songs, rounds and madrigals, brought together in collections by composers and arrangers such as Thomas Ravenscroft.

Her solitary voice reverberates through both the public spaces of the City and a collective memory of song, animating what Peter Ackroyd called “the teeming silence” of the City.
Susan Philipsz has been nominated for the Turner Prize 2010 for Lowlands, a work installed under three bridges beside the River Clyde in Glasgow. Her work is in the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain, 5 October 2010 – 2 January 2011.

SURROUND ME - A Song Cycle for the City of London can be heard every Saturday and Sunday (excluding Christmas Day, but including Boxing Day and New Year’s Day) from 10am until 5:00pm across the City of London. Detailed information and a map of locations can be found at: http:// www.artangel.org.uk>