Neil Luck was awarded the Andrew Mangold music residency at Casa Mahler open call. He attended our Spring 2024 residency session. Luck writes: “I used the residency to develop a project centred around experimental approaches to group listening, sensing, performing, and walking in rural, or semi-rural areas. I am developing a body of Sensible Activities; exercises, instructions, and performance strategies which transpose mediated ways of seeing and hearing into environments removed from electrical, or digital technology. These walks and tasks are not simply listening experiences, but are designed as critically performative excursions into natural environments, a resilient performance practice that requires little external or institutional infrastructure to be realised. Perhaps it chimes with the late Romantic concept of the Sublime; the awesome, unknowable, the occult. For the Romantics, and not least Gustav Mahler, the interest in the pastoral and sublime in music was in part a reaction to encroaching industrialisation in Europe. For me, these interests are catalysed specifically by both an awareness of a changing planet, and the ubiquity of digital technologies.”

At our Open Studios, Luck presented a short film made in Spoleto, titled Six New Leaf Strategies (2024, 8″30′), documenting his ongoing exploration of local flora as music/noise instrument. He also shared a body of scores produced during the residency and relating to the Sensible Activities.

As part of his Open Studio, Luck also organised a performance walk through the centre of Spoleto, with an audience who were asked to engage with the new Sensible Activities. He described the walk as an experiment with “…a series of exercises, pieces, and actions designed to set the city into surreal reverberations, and realign your sensorium. Sensible Activities are ways of altering and heightening our senses; perceiving, activating, and performing familiar spaces in strange new ways.” The walk involved collective listening experiences with sticks and stones, call and response echo exercises using the acoustic properties of the Piazza del Duomo, ‘ear-worm’ recreations using water fountains, leaf-playing lessons, and the detection of microscopic sonic reflections in the arches of Spoleto’s medieval aqueduct. (Photo-documentation below). Luck is developing a publication and audio release relating to these studies, as well as further events/concerts.