Sounds from beneath

Sounds from Beneath is the third act of a six-part interdisciplinary project by artist Mikhail Karikis entitled Xenon: an exploded opera. Commissioned by East Kent Festival Cluster Sounds from Beneath is an audio-visual piece which finds Karikisin collaboration with visual artist Uriel Orlowand a male colliery choir. Centred around a new work for voices, Karikis invited Snowdown Colliery Welfare Male Voice Choir to recall and sing the subterranean sounds of a working mine, bringing a desolate disused coalmine back to life through song. A colliery in East Kent, once populated with workers, machines and the sounds of their activities transforms into an amphitheatre haunted by a stranger, resonating sounds of explosions in the ground, machines cutting the coal-face, shovels scratching the earth and the distant melody of the Miner’s Lament, all sung by the choir grouping in formations reminiscent of picket lines. Sounds from Beneath continues Mikhail Karikis’s exploration of notions of the stranger and his engagement with the voice as a sculptural material, investigating diverse vocal acts and the marginalisation of voices. In addition to the work being a meditation on singing as an act of resistance and community, it ruminates upon the relationship between the human voice and the machine, reflects on the under-representation of old voices, while celebrating communal music-making.