Original work by Fari Bradley
An Inner Ear
This is an extract. The full piece is 8'48".
This piece demonstrates life’s multiple distractions; and is designed for your undivided attention. In a masterclass of ‘show, don’t tell’, Bradley imagines what the bombardment of modern life sounds like at a molecular level, for example, at the very electrical impulse of a synapse, or the firing of a nerve. A practical demonstration of how sounds interrupt the very medium they are carried on - the airwaves - here not just the unconscious becomes rippled by 'modern life', but our very being.
Perversely, impishly Bradley creates space for the listener to explore their own unconscious, yet repeatedly derails them in a quick-fire series of mini-meditations. The listener concentrates on one thought, only to suddenly to have another fired up, leaving each thought hanging. "An Inner Ear" is, in other words, an anti-meditation.
Bradley searches for the sounds of "our innermost microcosmic soundscapes" and how these are "disturbed by the proliferation of man-made signals in the radio-wave spectrum." She states: "While looking for inner sounds we instead pick up on the man-made signals that the ether is now increasingly littered with."
"An Inner Ear" is an antidote to the warning of author Nicholas Carr in his book The Shallows: "Carr argues that a wired computer contains the ecology of interruption technologies. [...] Attentiveness as part of memory consolidation fades away, since mechanistic precision displaces contemplation relevant to developing insight."