last record is a collaborative project between ivon oates, a visual artist, and jane margeson, a classical musician, responding to the architectural soundscape found in the burton cliff hotel, soon to be redeveloped. the work was made during a labculture residency organised by pva medialab, the producers of this work.
the tracks were recorded in the ballroom space, the kitchen passage and a bedroom/bathroom annex, and include imaginations drawn from our own backgrounds in architecture and music – references to gabriel fauré’s ‘berceuce’, angel v. villoldo’s ‘tango
criollo’ and j.g.ballard’s sensational “stellavista’, ‘high rise’ and ‘atrocity exhibition’.
Ballard’s notion of ‘psychotropic homes’ profoundly prefigured architectural ideals of ‘intelligent buildings’ of the seventies and later.
architecture, as sonic space, layers the building’s history in parallel with the landscape. the ‘uncovering’ of imagined sounds echo the scouring away of sedimented rock to reveal underlying records over time.
