Chapter

Outsights (Interview)

EXCERPT

ROBIN MACKAY: In On Vanishing Land, a piece you have described as an ‘audio essay’, but also as ‘sonic fiction’, you’ve chosen consciously to use sound alone, with no visual accompaniment. The piece focuses on evoking a particular area—the Suffolk coastline—and explores the concept of the ‘eerie’ through involvements with the literature, film, and music that this place has inspired, or which are called up by the conceptual figures of the beach, the eroded coastline, and other features of that particular landscape. What links these three things—the use of sound, the interest in place, and the eerie?

JUSTIN BARTON: There’s a whole process of abstracting out space in order to get to space. It’s not that amazing things aren’t done in very subtle ways in film. It’s just that something is afforded as a possibility by working solely with sound…