Three works for radio by composer and sound artist Harvey Young. First, Schisma Gulf: “In September 2024, I traced ethnographer Maurice Born’s journey to the island of Spinalonga, a former leper colony in the Gulf of Elounda, Crete. Buoyed by foggy iterations of Saint Panteleimon and mid-50s atrium film nights, I set about sonifying his initial investigations, from his arrival in a blow-up dinghy to the final survey of the admission and disinfection buildings.” Secondly, Isolgoss, a composition for five loudspeakers: “I’d been reading linguist James Burridge’s work on dialectal formation and spread. He applies surface tension dynamics to the interaction between language groupings. I thought it would be tasteful to interpret these mechanics using extended vocal techniques (trills, ululation, phonetically varied vowel shapes) and granular synthesis to capture the kineticism that underpins linguistic evolution. Mixed into spatial audio at Piel View House, Cumbria.” Thirdly, Lament for the Old Clock which tells the story of an 18th-century agricultural worker plunged into the vicious new frontier of industrial capitalism who must leave his simple agrarian existence behind and submit to the callous and dehumanising demands of the factory floor. The piece documents the change in temporality from the feudal notion of cyclical, reverential time to the concept of future-oriented progress that defined the beginning of the industrial revolution. Through extended vocal techniques, found instruments and granulation, Lament for the Old Clock explores this transient yet profound period of temporal and spiritual upheaval.
Harvey composer-in-residence at the Abeceda Institute, Ljubljana (2025), and has presented electroacoustic installations in Europe and North America. His experimental opera and poetry works have been commissioned by Resonance Extra and Whitechapel Gallery, and he writes at presents Pitch-Complex on Radio Worm. He has contributed research to Oscar-nominated producer Jaimie D’Cruz’s Acme Films, and assisted John Akomfrah on the video installation In the Hour of the Dog for the Baltimore Museum of Art.
