Quarry of Sound

Bobby Jewell05.12.2025Article, Issue 02

“The Earth is also sound
guided by sound
and so are all things of the earth”^{11Pauline Oliveros, “The Earth Worm Also Sings: A Composer’s Practice of Deep Listening,” Leonardo Music Journal 3 (1993): 36.}

In her poem “The Earth Worm Also Sings,” composer Pauline Oliveros talks about stone and our planet in a way that touches on the material's deep ties to geological time, sound, and resonance, suggesting that rocks act as the earth’s memory, recording everything that has ever happened. For sound artists Simon James, Antonia Kattou, and AAU ANASTAS with Tomoko Sauvage, stone is a rich and meaningful conduit for wider work related to colonialism, climate emergency, and class prejudice.

In Brighton, UK, self-trained sound artist Simon James used a Neolithic settlement and properties of flint as a starting point to engage with disadvantaged youth in the nearby estate of Whitehawk. Culminating in a sound art installation exhibited at Brighton and Hove Museum in 2024, the project “Neolithic Cannibals” was created in partnership with eight young people aged 11-14.

Described as “Brighton’s most deprived estate,” Whitehawk has long been a subject of derision in the city. The name “Neolithic Cannibals” was a reclaiming of negative assumptions made by archaeologists in the early 20th century who, upon first looking at the five-thousand-year-old site, mistakenly thought they had found evidence of cannibalism. This was gleefully reported by journalists at the time who saw scarce difference between the contemporary residents of Whitehawk and their Neolithic “cannibal” counterparts.

“Neolithic Cannibals” came about as Simon James had been working with his twin brother Curtis on campaign group Class Divide: a grassroots organisation of residents, parents, and teachers who, for the past four years, have been calling for fairer choice in schools for residents of Whitehawk.

Class Divide has “given a voice to an area that for far too long has been unheard,” James said over interview, a feeling he knew all too well as being originally from the estate himself. “I wanted Whitehawk to be heard positively.”^{22Interview with Simon James, online meeting, August 2025.}

A commission from Brighton Festival gave him a venue, the Brighton & Hove Museum, and for James, the aim was to create an uncompromising and experimental sound installation that wasn’t stereotypical “community art” yet arose from the community just the same.

Turning to the landscape around the estate, James saw the parallels between a concealed Whitehawk Neolithic settlement and the social story of the ignored community. After consulting with archaeologist Jon Sygrave, James used his array of music equipment to engage with the youth at the local community centre Crew Club.

“I made the noise, left the door open,” James said of these evening sessions where he set up tables of synthesizers, loopers, and sound devices for anyone to use. This led to the formation of a core group of young people and six workshops where James—accepting the “absolute chaos” that comes with giving a group of teenagers electronic music equipment—used that energy to challenge them to experiment with sound.

Workshops were then held with Grant Williams, a flint knapper and reconstructive archaeologist who demonstrated the historical importance of the relationship between stone and sound in the Neolithic era. Creating tools for the group, he showed how workers had to be constantly listening to the sounds being made and how he was guided by the noises and pitch of the flint during this process.

This wasn’t the only connection between sound and archaeology. In 1932, the site had been “discovered” by a team of archaeologists and labourers using a Bosing Tool, a simple geophysical sounding device consisting of a piece of heavy lead attached to a stick. The archaeologists would strike the ground with the tool and listen to the sound of the impact. A hollow thud would indicate buried structures, while a solid sound would suggest undisturbed earth. Revisiting this sonic method, the excavation lines plotted out almost a hundred years ago served as a makeshift score for the “Neolithic Cannibals” sound installation.

Recording the sounds of stone throughout this research, the group put on their own version of Pauline Oliveros’s “Rock Piece” under a foot tunnel. Wherein the young people used flints gathered from the Neolithic site to do an improvised performance focused on “just moving and playing, exploring friction and the percussive sounds of flint.”

James assembled these recorded and manipulated sounds into a wider twenty-minute multi-speaker piece for the exhibition. Though unsure of how audiences would react, he found visitors were captivated by the visceral sounds of electronics, stone, and young people. By using the land and history around Whitehawk as inspiration for the young people, James was able to reclaim it from the long-held derision that residents of Whitehawk have experienced from the rest of Brighton for decades. The stones underneath Whitehawk had yielded a wealth of creativity and storytelling that served as a meta-narrative for the talents of this overlooked community.

For Cypriot Antonia Kattou, it was a teenage love of hiking that first developed her interest in the stones and landscape of the Troodos Mountains, the island's largest mountain range. Now a composer, sound artist and researcher, she has been revisiting her relationship with water, stone and identity over the past few years of her practice, drawing on climate change, geology and neo-colonialism of Cyprus.

Influenced by John Cage’s 1983 piece “Ryoanji,” and his use of the rocks and sands of a traditional Japanese garden in Kyoto, Kattou travelled out to the Troodos mountains and—using mallets, sticks and stones—recorded the sounds of her playing the mountain range as her own large-scale lithophone. The process was a freeing one for the multi-instrumentalist, Kattou: “It was the most natural way to try to make sounds. I shouldn’t really know their functionality or how to properly play them. It was decolonising me from the classical curriculum.”^{33Interview with Antonia Kattou, online meeting, September 2025.}

Alongside these field recordings, Kattou examined these stones to inform her compositions. The individual details and contours served as rough scores for the pieces and as guides for the sinewaves she programmed her synthesizers with for live performances.

One performance was “Liquid Hot Mess” in October 2024 at Xydadiko - Old Vinegar Factory at Limassol’s Centre of Performing Arts MITOS. The event was part of Kattou’s wider Mystiki Fleva (ΜΦ) project connecting geology, locality, and identity. The name Mystiki Fleva when translated into English means “secret vein,” a reference to her uncooperative veins when going for regular testing for thyroid cancer, which affects 1 in 3 people in Cyprus.

Kattou wanted to bring not just the sounds of Cyprus's stone and water into the formal space of a gallery, but the objects themselves. This allowed audiences to get closer to water, stone, earth, and soil. Importantly, she brought large stones from the nearby Governor’s Beach onto the stage and placed her instruments on top of them. A metaphor about the security and stability of local stone in the face of the country’s current crises.

Extreme temperatures are already being felt in Cyprus from the global climate emergency, but this is being exacerbated by a neo-colonial construction boom causing flooding, damage to wildlife, and extracting resources. The predominantly Russian-financed luxury developments have been taking over cities like Limassol since 2014. This has been pricing out locals, polluting the city, blocking rivers, threatening traditional stone-built buildings, and cementing the corrupt tax haven status of the country.

Careless short-term thinking from outsiders is not new to Cyprus and has been a contributing threat to the country since the British Empire. As Kattou explained, "Cyprus is suffering from colonialism, post-colonialism and neocolonialism, as Cypriots we never learn to be alone and we’re never allowed to be alone. My use of stone, and other natural materials, is about reclaiming the land and listening to the sounds of our landscape.”

There's a strong sense of care in Cypriot identity between human and non-human life. Harmful developments are opposed by community-led protests, and people come together to rapidly respond to emergencies such as the recent wildfires this year. For Kattou, her sound work is a creative act of resistance but also one that reflects this emphasis on care and symbiosis, preserving the history and future of the Cypriot people and ecology of their island.

For architects and co-founders of Radio Alhara, AAU ANASTAS, the use of stone is deeply connected with their own Palestinian heritage, resistance to occupation, and cross-disciplinary projects. “In Palestine, everything is built in stone,”^{44Interview with AAU ANASTAS and Tomoko Sauvage, online meeting, December 2024.} said Elias Anastas, who runs the Paris/Bethlehem-based practice with his brother Yousef.

Substantially better for the planet than the more commonly imported concrete and steel, the historical knowledge of using stone in Palestine provides the architects with ample opportunities to innovate and collaborate with others: “From our quarrymen, who are sommeliers of mountains, to stonemasons, Palestine has an opportunity to bring to the world a new way of thinking about architecture.”

This search for new forms can be seen in their recent collaboration with Japanese musician and sound artist Tomoko Sauvage, “The Serpentine Bell” in Reims, France. Formed of hand-blown glass blocks in the shape of layered bubbles, the public installation is supported by a stone base and stilts that allow audiences to step in and listen to Sauvage’s soundscape.

Although initially looking otherworldly, its appearance and sounds have close ties to the earth and stone of Reims. Its garden site sits atop a chalk pit, which Sauvage used to make field recordings, dragging chalk through water. This created tiny bubbles, which, when recorded, “sounded like insects, rainforest, a baby crying.” Sauvage then mixed those sounds with other water-based instruments. Sauvage: “Sound art is a time-based practice but I thought of this geological time too, as there’s a connection between all these materials (stone, glass, and water), and their use by myself and AAU ANASTAS.”

The brothers' use of stone in their architecture is a political act tied to the reclamation of territory, culture, and building techniques that have been under threat for decades from British and Israeli occupation. “Despite its abundance, Palestine suffers from a misuse of stone,” said Yousef, explaining that although traditionally used as a structural material, Israeli mining simply extracts stone to sell to foreign markets or as a surface-level material for cladding. As he concludes, “the know-how of stone building is disappearing,” underscoring the need to use stone responsibly and appropriately whenever possible.

Not only that, but AAU ANASTAS manages to connect their sustainable use of stone to the preservation of Palestinian music and culture. This is evident in two of their freestanding stone pavilions: While We Wait and Stone Matters. Both were created as inviting spaces for meetings and concerts that are sheltered from the elements and are—by design—in opposition to the oppressive Israeli-built walls that run through the Palestinian landscape.

Their award-winning cultural and production hub in Bethlehem, The Wonder Cabinet, further exemplifies this commitment to craft, community, and innovation. A bold, modernist statement of raw concrete in the north of the city, The Wonder Cabinet brings together multiple disciplines and sectors under one roof with open-plan studio spaces and a restaurant facilitating the work of artisans, artists, and makers. As a centre for sound and music, The Wonder Cabinet regularly broadcasts shows on Radio Alhara and NTS and has hosted concerts by the likes of fellow Palestinian’s dirar kalashi, Makimakkuk and Ibrahim Owais and was opened in May 2024 with an inaugural performance by Tomoko Sauvage.

The building sums up AAU ANASTAS’s nurturing, holistic ethos that underlines all their work, wherein multiple mediums can collaborate, interact, and be encouraged together. Yousef explains, “We have different practices that cross over: the architecture studio, Radio Alhara, and The Wonder Cabinet. They are places where people can experiment and produce art, architecture, sound, and making. Most of the architecture around us is shaped by real estate investors and rules of structure, but never by sound.”

It’s not just resistance to occupation that fuels AAU ANASTAS but this strong desire to re-imagine and better the myriad processes and decisions that shape everyday life. As Yousef asks rhetorically about this overlooked relationship between acoustics and building design, “What if the intervention of sound composition and artists could influence the way we live in spaces? What if sound could shape architecture?”

“Listening to the Earth” is a phrase often used in climate activism as a metaphor for how human activity has fallen out of step with nature and the damage that’s caused to each other and the planet. However, as stressed by Pauline Oliveros, whose work was a vein that ran through all of the artists I spoke with, listening is—importantly—not a passive act. For Kattou, James, and AAU ANASTAS, their use of stone and sound art is just one part of interconnected and fierce acts of resistance that centre listening, care, community, and the quarries of sound beneath us.

Bobby Jewell is a sound artist and climate activist based in Glasgow, UK. His ambient show Earth Tones can be heard on Radio Alhara.