Sood, Arun. 2024. “Memory, Sound, and Orality: Re-inhabiting the Island of Vallay.” Global Performance Studies 7 (2). https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv7n2a125
This immersive soundwalk comprises synthesized field recordings from the island of Vallay. It varies in modulation, following a graph for the average pattern of winter tide charts for the island. At high and low tides, new compositions—in the form of music, spoken word, and oral histories—are layered over the field recordings, dislocating them from their site-specific context. The soundwalk responds to Helmut Kaffenberger’s ‘acoustics of profane illumination’ (1999), whereby seemingly inconsequential sounds prompt transcendental memory recall. The process of liberating the rumble of wind, roar of ocean, and birdsong from Vallay, then rearranging them into new constellations, allows for a recontextualization that transforms our sense of the place and its past. The sounds of a specific place become an excavation site, whereby acoustic ruins can be retrieved and reassembled to provide new modes of knowledge and perception.
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I am crossing the Vallay Strand. The wind rattles. The geese shriek. Boots into sand.
In time all of this will be synthesized.
Into poems. Into songs. Into sound.
Vallay lies approximately two miles off the Northwest coast of North Uist, the Outer Hebridies. On foot, it can only be accessed from North Uist for two hours at low tide, across vast tidal sands which quickly flood with saltwater that gushes in from the Atlantic, cutting it off from the ‘mainland’. A central figure in the island’s history is Erskine Beveridge (1851–1920)—a textile manufacturer turned antiquarian, photographer and archaeologist. Beveridge’s textile business funded his travels throughout Scotland, and his ‘wanderings with a camera 2 led to the publication of several books on Scottish history and archaeology. Most notable were his archaeological excavations in the Outer Hebridies, which he conducted from a lavish Edwardian mansion—Taigh Mòr—he built on Vallay in 1905. From his base at the “Big House”, Beveridge excavated “Earth Houses”, found shards, polished bone fragments, and pieced together layers of the island’s peoples and pasts. This searching, or re-searching, led to the publication of North Uist: Its Archaeology and Topography in 1911.
There is a family tree printed on A3 paper that traces my relations on the island of Vallay back to the 1750s. An odd photograph from the early twentieth century is peppered amongst the hierarchical lines that separate one generation from the next. It’s often been remarked how much the photograph of John MacDonald (my great-great-grandfather, b.1855) bears an uncanny resemblance to me. While his burrowed, dark brown, and angular bone structure is easily noted, the extent to which he inhabits my breath, sound, being, and way of seeing is met with a silence about which I have always been curious and intrigued.
Family trees and photographs can be good for tracing facts, but they are also linear, hierarchical, and silent. Names and dates are empirical but impersonal. Lines appear fixed, static, quiet. Some family members appear closer than others. And it’s unclear why we call some our family, others our ancestors, and none our ghosts. This soundwalk seeks to sing over these silences. Using sound, composition, field recordings, oral histories, spoken word, visual art, archive, and photography, it’s an attempt to form a chorus with ancestors, and to sing about the place they once were, and remain.
I begin to walk in and around the house. Shards of rafters. Broken glass.
These ruinations.
My illuminations.
Beveridge’s mansion was lavish, even extravagant, in its Edwardian heyday. Colourful fireplaces graced every room, fresh water was piped in from the mainland, and it was said that exactly 365 panes of glass were used to populate the ornate window frames.
As Fraser MacDonald notes in his essay ‘The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge’:
This ample provision should be understood in the context of its [Vallay’s] remoteness: every brick and beam needed to be brought in by steamer and, depending on tides, offloaded on the shore for its final journey by horse and cart to the house site. Even the soil for the garden was imported by boat. These materials, once so carefully selected, transported and arranged, are now subject to the same ecological decay that buried Beveridge’s cherished Earth-houses. Taigh Mòr is a ruin. Its ruination continues with every passing year, bringing down a few more bricks, rafters, floor boards and roof-tiles. (MacDonald 2014, 3)
My grandmother, Katie MacNaughton (née Maclellan), was a housekeeper in Beveridge’s mansion. Her family lived in a small farmhouse adjacent to the “Big House.” She lit its numerous fires in the morning, polished the windows, and did the baking for Beveridge’s son George (who amenably employed her as a housekeeper while her brothers were paid to work the land). I grew up on her stories about Vallay. She spoke of wading knee-deep across the water, skirt hiked up, after a cèilidh finished on North Uist at dusk; her brother’s bagpipes droning across a moonlit strand; laments of leaving a special place knowing she would probably never return. The grand mansion gradually fell into disrepair after George Beveridge drowned in 1944 while crossing the strand at high tide; leaving no heir nor work for the small population of crofters, groundsmen, and housekeepers who departed the island shortly after. My grandmother was one of the last to leave. This soundwalk locates my family story in this broader palimpsest of cultural, natural, and psychic layers that comprise the now uninhabited island.
There is, of course, an irony, or uncanny significance, in the fact that Erskine Beveridge was also concerned with recovering the past through photography, excavation, and collecting—a continual search for connections between then and now. A continual connection exists between art, ancestry, and place.
I exit the ruins and begin to walk around the island.
Clockwise.
But time and clocks feel irrelevant now.
The Atlantic waves lap beside me.
Cattle on the mound ahead.
Life remains amidst nothing.
The microphone bound to waist. Phone in hand.
Walking with sound. Walking in sound.
The sounds of the island needed to be heard, as did the people who knew it, who know it, and who are moved by it. This album incorporates spoken word from island descendants, including my own kin and those of Erskine Beveridge, as well as the throaty scowls of geese, flapping pigeons, and gull shrieks from within the decaying mansion itself. These sounds are set against newly composed musical responses to the island and its histories. The channelling of voices, original music, poetry, spectral yawps, and field recordings allows ancestors to dance together and transcend spatio-temporal limitations through shared sonic experience.
I have a heightened sensitivity to the sounds of the place: the geese, the gull's shrieks, the grassy whispers. I began to wonder if my grandmother might have heard similar sonic tapestries to those I was hearing, albeit in a different time. It was these seemingly inconsequential sounds, perceived within a dense weave of personal narrative and history, that started to prompt the possibility of sound triggering memories and re-imaginings of the past.
In discussing the role of sound in the writings of Walter Benjamin, the German literary scholar Helmut Kaffenberger (1999) describes the concept of an “acoustics of profane illumination” (4), whereby seemingly accidental or inconsequential sounds can prompt transcendental memory recall. Kaffenberger describes how mundane sounds—buzzing, chirping, droning, rumbling—can inaugurate dream-like experiences and collapse temporalities, bringing the past into dialogue with the present in transformative ways. These sonic “profane illuminations”, or “rememories”, bring us into contact with the past—even if there is no tangible sense of having physically been there. Mirko M. Hall (2014) has further described the mnemonic function of sound in its capacity to recover “long-forgotten traces of past experiences” (5). Thus, the sounds of a specific site or place become an excavation site, whereby acoustic ruins can be retrieved and reassembled to provide a “mode of knowledge that often exceeds logical categories of perception” (6). Like Beveridge’s excavations, my own soundwalk attempts to forge connections with Vallay’s past. It blasts acoustic phenomena out of their geographical and historical contexts; alters them; distorts them; loops them; and reconfigures them into new constellations that explode the reified past.
The process of liberating the rumble of wind, roar of ocean, and birdsong from Vallay and rearranging them into new compositions allows for a recontextualization that transforms the past. The sounds of place become a courier for past histories and peoples to be revealed, remembered, and redeemed….
This realization of the potentiality of sound led to this walk, which led to this work.
Benjamin, Walter. 1972–89. Gesammelte Schriften, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. Suhrkamp.
Beveridge, Erskine. 1911. North Uist: Its archaeology and topography with notes about the early history of the Outer Hebrides, Privately printed, Edinburgh.
Beveridge, Erskine. 1922. Wanderings with a Camera. Privately printed, Edinburgh.
Hall, Mirko M. 2014. “Walter Benjamin and the Dialectical Sonority.” In Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking against the Grain, 1800–1980. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449955_3.
Kaffenberger, Helmut. 1999. “Aspekte von Bildlichkeit in den Denkbildern Walter Benjamins,” in global benjamin: Internationaler Walter-Benjamin-Kongreß 1992, edited by Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm, vol. 1. Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
MacDonald, Fraser. 2014. “The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39 (4): 477–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12042.