Listening together-apart (2022) is a theory of listening, which is always listening and responding, that I am continually practising and developing through my work. I hear it is a way of being in the world; a way of tuning with and through others. It is a way of listening that is always changing, as I am changed by the matters I listen to and the people I listen with.

Between 2016 and 2021 I undertook a practice-research PhD project at the University of Glasgow exploring collaborative approaches to the conceptual and actual composition of sound with moving images. Through a portfolio of compositions spanning film, installation, publication, performance, music and sonic arts the thesis I wrote explores the notion of the sound-image; an agential entanglement of sound, image, artist, audience, and the matters to which each sound-image speaks. Theories of non-hierarchical, non-binary relation in cultural studies, sound and filmmaking are explored through collaborative projects realised with artists and community groups, using the indeterminacy of Open Works as a site for creative investigation into these matters. The text outlines the theoretical framework for this study and documents the practical and conceptual approaches to each work included in the portfolio.

Funded by The Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities and The Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Complete Thesis (PDF)

I am an artist-composer from Glasgow living in the Isle of Skye. I work collaboratively with community groups and other artists to make communal sounds that explore the pluralities of authorship, agency and understanding that can emerge through listening and sounding together.

info (at) richycarey.com

CV (PDF)

photo : Matthew Arthur Williams, 2023.

{ stereo – type – music }

Choral performance workshop, 5 channel sound installation and newsprint publication.

{stereo – type – music} considers how publishing practices inform the ways we listen to each other, through a surround sound work, choral performance and accompanying newsprint publication of scores, stories, letters, and texts. The work explores the materiality of stereo sound, which derives from Greek word stereós, meaning solid, and the forms of solidarity that can emerge from listening with an ear tuned towards kind of ongoing fluidity.

The sound work is created from collectively composed scores and recordings made from multiple perspectives; from choral singing sessions, memories of newspaper callers, graphic scoring workshops, field recording classes, the vast factory floor of DC Thomson’s print works and the intimate handmade letter presses of Quarto Press.

The publication includes contributions from Sharlene Bamboat, Erin Farley, Emmie McLuskey, Salomé Voegelin and Matthew Arthur Williams and was designed by Luke Cassidy Greer of Yalla Riso.

The work was curated and created by Helen Nisbett, Becca Clark and Lizzie Day.

{stereo – type – music} was commissioned by Art Night, co-commissioned by the Tetley, Leeds. With support from Creative Kernow, The Elephant Trust, the University of Dundee and the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities.

First performed at Baxter Park as part of Art Night, Dundee. Jun 2023. Exhibited at the Tetley, Leeds July-Oct 2023. Exhibited at FLAMM, Cornwall. October 2023.

wild tracks radio

wild traks radio are a group of young artists from Edinburgh; Jamal, Khiana, Tara and Rona, and a composer living on the Isle of Skye called Richy Carey. The group are interested in sounds and sci-fi, and work together to imagine new ways exploring their surroundings through field recording, story writing and soundtrack making. Initially working through the COVID lockdowns of 2020, the group devised a series of sci-fi radio docu-dramas that grew from sounds collected around their homes and created three episodes Under Okta in Peril, Water Walkers and the Listening Crystal.

Tara and Rona’s episode, wild tracks radio: Under Okta in Peril follows the adventures of Pheen the scientist and her robot sidekick Ultra - *, who teleports to different worlds seeking to understand the Crescendo, a terrible sound that is plaguing their home world of Under Okta.

Jamal and Khiana’s episode, wild tracks radio: Water Walkers follows the adventures of Katra and Kool, two siblings who live on a watery planet full of wonderous spiritual peoples and animals. The two adventurers dive down into the depths of their ocean and find a magical crystal that opens up a portal into another world.

wild tracks radio: the Listening Crystal is the third and final episode in the series, which weaves together both narratives in their shared searching of the universe for a legendary sound that is rumoured to have the power to bring peace to their home worlds.

wild tracks radio (2020)

wild tracks radio: the Listening Crystal (2021)

Documenation of Process

wild tracks radio was originally commissioned by Collective, Edinburgh and premiered on Radiophrenia 2021. The third episode, wild tracks radio: the Listening Crystal was commissioned by LUX Scotland and BBC Arts and premiered on BBC Radio 6.

Åčçëñtß

There is no wrong way to sound.
Listen to the voices around you.
The texts are only lines, follow them, bend them, or forget them.
Let the image be the conductor.

Åčçëñtß is a sound-image work that employs subtitles as verbal notation to suggest the performance of its own soundtrack. Made with community choirs across Glasgow, the project explores accents as a musical material in our everyday voices that resonates with the complex flux between individual and collective identity echoed in the sound-image. The work is realised by its audience, sounding entirely different each time it is performed, reflecting the histories, presents and imagined futures of those who create it.

First performed at the Glasgow Royal Concert Halls as part of the Glasgow Short Film Festival 2019. Commissioned as part of my role as Glasgow's first UNESCO City of Music artist-in-residence, 2018.All images are courtesy of the artist.

Live Performance & Documentation of Process

The Forest of Everything

In collaboration with Wendy Kirkup

The Forest of Everything is a sound-image work composed in collaboration with a group of children from a Glaswegian after-school club and artist-filmmaker Wendy Kirkup, inspired by John Paynter’s research into the use of open works in classroom music making.

The work responds to Orcadian poet and experimental filmmaker Margaret Tait’s Aerial (1974) and departs from Paynter’s classroom exercises in the spirit of Aerial; a way of exploring light and sound guided by people who instinctively create through play to discover what the materials can do. The film and its soundtrack were created through a series of workshops whereby the children recorded their own sounds and created their own graphic scores, as a way of hearing instruments being played with and a world of sonorous possibility emerging in the ear of the recording artists.

The Forest of Everything is a difficult work to describe. As with Aerial, and as it is with play, it may be best understood if you “allow yourself to respond to it instead of trying to follow it intellectually” (Tait, 2021).

The Forest of Everything was commissioned for ‘there and then and never again‘, Margaret Tait 100 and by LUX Scotland, 2019.

Near by

Near by (2018) is a publication that emerged from conversations between collaborating artists tracing lines between sound, text and image across four works:

Memo to Spring with Sarah Rose. NOW, The Scottish National Galleries of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Oct ’17 – Feb ’18.

Special Works School with Bambitchell (Sharlene Bamboat and Alexis Mitchell). Gallery TPW, Toronto, Jan – Feb ’18 + Berlinale, Berlin, Feb ’18.

Wondering Soul with Alexander Storey Gordon. Radiophrenia, Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, Nov ’17.

Sonorous Objects with Mark Bleakley and Lauren Gault. Artist Moving Image Festival, Tramway, Glasgow, Oct ’18.

The publication was composed from a series of letters between the author and the artists, written during and following their collaborations. The letters spoke to the authors’ processes of thinking and making collaboratively, the subjects of their works, and the translation of sound, image, object, and text through one another. These letters were then exploded and recomposed into a series of overlapping text scores as a way of diffracting fragments of these conversations around four knots: sound, word, image, and pattern. Author and long-time collaborator Martin Cathcart Froden then edited these fragments into four monologues: a distillation of this polyphony into a monophony, a letter in reply.

Near by was printed on recycled paper and tracing paper, with each copy made by hand at Publication Studio Glasgow, May 2018. Funded by Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities.

Downalod PDF

All images are courtesy of the artist

crystalliquid

is an interactive installation made with and for young children. It is a work exploring playfully and collaboratively imagining the sound of liquid crystals, a material mediating many of our sound-image encounters.

In 2018 I was invited by Tramway, Glasgow, to make a new work for children between the ages of 0-12, which would be exhibited as part of a group show called Children’s Exhibition (Tramway 2018). Liquid crystals are a non-classical state of matter; they are neither entirely solid nor entirely liquid, but a matter with properties of both states. The molecules in the kinds of liquid crystal found in LCD screens ‘twist’ from a randomly distributed order to all being aligned in the same order when heat is applied to them. It is this twisting that allows light to shine through. Each pixel on an LCD screen is really made from three subpixels, one green, one blue and one red. The amount of voltage applied to the liquid crystal in each subpixel changes the amount of light allowed through, which is how the blend of these three colours is created in every pixel on your screen. Like the relationship between sound and image in the sound-image, and our relationships with ourselves and each other, liquid crystals are neither one thing, nor the other, but both at the same time. The twist inherent in the liquid crystal is a means to articulate this kind of relational difference that is inherent in thinking through non-binary positions.

I made the piece with children from a school local to the gallery, Glendale Primary, to imagine what liquid crystals might sound like. We worked with choreographer Mark Bleakley to move between liquid and crystal states with our bodies, we played games translating what we felt with our bodies into sound, and from sound into movement. These workshops were filmed by Margaret Salmon. crystalliquid was installed as a moving image work whose soundtrack was unveiled in stages, controlled by children in the gallery as they partook in similar exercises in the space to activate the work.

HD Video, Stereo
Interactive installation
8 min

Commissioned by
Tramway, Glasgow

First exhibited at Children’s Exhibition
Tramway, Glasgow
Jul 7 – Aug 26, 2018
Choreography
Mark Bleakley

Director of Photography
Margaret Salmon

Programming and Interactive Design
Jen Sykes

Liquid crystal imagery
Prof. Vance Williams