Composer Robert Wilsmore and writer and performer Claire Hind, collectively The Long Dead Stars, are collaborating on an Electronic Dance Poetry, sound inspired by the geology of the North Yorkshire coastline. Claire and Robert bring together creative descriptions of how rocks move and become, through words and through the corporeal experience of Electronic Dance Music (EDM). We lend our voices, our words, our music to the chorus of those concerned with the future in an Anthropocene epoch. We align with the flattened ontology of Bruno Latour, Graham Harman, Jane Bennet and others, that level the rock-human world through the ‘force of things’ (Bennett, 2004) and where ‘all art is ecology’ (Morton, 2021).
We can feel rocks against our bodies, we can feel the beat of the music within our bodies, we can feel the beat of the moving rocks within our bodies. Time moves on, and time is only things moving (if only we knew what ‘things’ are, or what ‘moving’ is?). We can, however, have experiences that help us think and feel in a way that may change, for the better, how we engage with the world.
Written out of their research interests in geology and walking performance as a philosophical, collaborative composition, Claire and Rob have been dancing with Mudstone, with Siltstone and Peak Steel, and the Dogger Formations of the Ravenscar Coastline, up through to Sandsend and have specific interest in listening to rock, to write Electronic Dance Poetry (EDP). The lyrics are inspired by Claire’s practice of embodying geological rock.