The past is not dead. It is not even the past.
William Faulkner
From June to September 2018, Polish audio-visual composer, Ela Orleans, was resident in Huntly, listening.
In 300 years, what will our local language sound like? Will the same bird sounds be heard in and around Huntly? Will there be a town? Will we be thriving or even surviving?
Through the production of electronic music, video and a timeless language of symbols, Lunar Odyssey engages us with our increasingly alien past culture before it is lost, and asks us to consider how we preserve and develop it to survive the unknown journey of our future. In response to the White Wood, Ela's project aimed to create an audio-visual time capsule to capture the sound of the past 100 years of the town and its lands, within the present-day framework of her electronic composition. Like Huntly’s own Voyager Gold Record, it preserves and projects our aural culture forwards into the time and space of an uncertain future. Lunar Odyssey strived to document local Scots and Doric language tied to the people and land, folksong, and sounds of the ecology – all of which have been threatened as the twentieth century progressed into the present. Her completed film work Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes stands as an audio-visual time capsule for the future.
Lunar Odyssey forms a part of Ela’s PhD research at the music department of the University of Glasgow.
