Genius idea, inspiring location – the future of radio – Ed Baxter
I am excited to be involved with this nascent radio art form, which will prove to be an utterly seminal project – Sarah Washington, Mobile Radio
This is a wonderful and life affirming project – Andrew Deakin, Full of Noises
This sounds like the most brilliant thing – Bram Arnold
Dartmoor stands out in my life as a distant horizon, a place of pleasure, danger, majesty and solace. This project taps into the life of the land- its very sounds: the music of nature, and its people, its stories and its news, and shares them for our mutual enrichment – Jenny Wellwood
Every city in the world deserves something like this – Rodolpho Bertolini Junior
Dr Hannah Drayson:
Far from being simply an avant-garde experiment, Skylark is the result of a long engagement with questions about the nature and form of community broadcast. Its broadcast acts as an invitation, the talk-show radio studio with its mic and sound-desk set up, with glass booth and recording light has been disposed of. It has melted into the landscape in favour of material gathered through a network of community projects, workshops, audio-recorders in boxes, archival material, snippets of instrumental performance, artists submissions, and roaming radio producers. The result is not quite the moor ‘talking’ to itself, but more reinforcing its own presence, sonic moments running through temporal wormholes, to produce a revisioning and reinforcement of the moor’s own atmosphere. Where else do radio transmitters function to send an atmosphere back into itself?
Tony Whitehead
‘I love recording the sounds of Dartmoor, particularly its wildlife, through the seasons and over the years. It’s an ever-changing soundscape, and it’s great to be able to share the voices of the moor, along with the recordings of many other people, on Skylark.’
Sarah Washington, Mobile Radio:
‘More than just an irregular and innovative radio station, Skylark is in fact a giant sound installation. It feels like you could be dropping in on any point in history, tuning in to timeless people intertwined with wildlife and elemental forces across the mercurial moor. Each leaving their imprints on the other, and on the listeners, many of whom will find themselves drawn to become immortalised within this localised mythic space of poetic fragments, melodic markers, and atmospheric trails.’
Professor Michael Punt:
‘Skylark is an adventure that will engage a distributed community in the production of a version of cultural identity in a region most known through the idealization of its tors, picnic sites and ponies. And that seems to be a good idea (especially at the moment as some fairly basic expectations about the future are becoming slippery). Skylark redefines Dartmoor as a community that can speak for itself through its undivided attention to the sounds of place and people. In this creative collaboration with its users it has the potential to give voice to the previously unheard and also shift the nature of radio as a technological form away from the familiar to something that may surprise us.’