assengerfilms are back for an evening of film and discussion exploring the role of sound, music, and field recordings in place.

Featuring Lomax the Songhunter (2004, 90 mins), Roger Kappers’ documentary on the folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who travelled around the world collecting folk music. Kappers tells Lomax’s story through interviews with friends like Pete Seeger, archival recordings of musical legends including Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly, and footage of the settings where Lomax recorded sounds and songs.

The screening will be accompanied by talks:

Musicologist Jo Hicks (Oxford) will introduce the Hearing Landscape Critically research network – “an inter-disciplinary and inter-continental project addressing the intersections and cross-articulations of landscape, music, and the spaces of sound” – and speak on urban stasis and circulation in René Clair and Erik Satie’s short film Entr’acte (1924). Jo’s research is primarily concerned with late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century French music, especially music in and about Pari; this is overlapped by an interest in the politics and poetics of the audible landscape.

Writer and artist Justin Hopper will present and discuss his sonic poetry walking tours and their use of Anglo-American folk song. Justin’s work is rooted in his past as a journalist, but replaces traditional non-fiction with poetry as a way to approach truth in a fragmented world; he uses writing tied to specific locations to haunt them with myth.