Waiting Rooms: A short documentary

Three years ago, Samantha Whates decided she wanted to record her latest album away from the confines of a recording studio, preferring instead to take her music to everyday places and record the songs there. Following her progress over two years and six unusual recording sessions, this short film by Julius Beltrame & edited by Sam Errington is a small glimpse inside that journey, and a tribute to Samantha's unique achievement.

We’ve also been following Samantha’s progress in the making of this album, and you can read about some of the sessions here on Elsewhere.

Waiting Rooms by Samantha Whates - Part II: Loughton

Singer and songwriter Samantha Whates is writing and recording her forthcoming album entirely on location in a series of waiting rooms, some active, some abandoned, trains, buses, hospitals, ferries, care homes. The album will address themes of loss and waiting, of transition and of time passing in transient spaces

Dylan White, who has worked with Samantha on the project will be writing a series of posts for the Elsewhere blog from the different locations of the recording sessions. The second of the series takes us to an overnight recording in an art deco waiting room at the end of a tube line:

Underground 

It’s hard to believe Samantha ever recorded in here. Sneaked in after hours by game TFL staff and adrenalin. A four piece band, recording engineer and filmmaker. Laden. A full kit. Ad hoc power supply daisy chained up the steps from the opposite platform office. The bash of drums reverberating around this tiny glass and brick quadrangle in the dead of night and rain, as empty ghost trains howled past the station windows throughout. The first time music has been recorded live on the network, and perhaps not completely legally so let's hurry past the specifics.  

In her own estimation it’s not her strongest take. She can hear the cold and the wet and the hour in her vocal. For me it’s everything this project is and more. It’s hard. It’s brave. It’s exposing. It’s romantic as hell sure but it’s real. And cold. And stinks of people, both real and imagined.

This is a haunting, harrowing recording in an oddly beautiful, austere, Art Deco station on the very periphery of the city limits. Suburbia. Commuter belt. A twin hulled concrete spaceship perched precariously atop the perimeter. Ballardian dreams of hope and regret. The constant rumble of those empty commuter trains full of broken dreams is audible, rolling in and out throughout.

Recording this album has been an adventure, inhabiting and reinterpreting sometime public spaces in a totally honest and genuine way. On arrival here there was no power supply and the damp stench of it. Frankly it’s a horrible place. And it still stinks of piss. But that’s London, and that's real life. Imbued with stark lines, crittal windows and the utopian ideas of the 30’s, joined by a filthy dimplex heater maybe 50 years later, it’s grilled cover charred and warped. Someone’s twitter handle scrawled on with a marker pen perhaps 30 years later still. 

How many people have sat right here? How many countless mornings of thought, apprehension, worry, elation have people sat and lived on these municipal wooden benches. No one seems to use these waiting rooms anymore. Are we too busy. Are the trains too frequent. Do we ever just stop to think, to wait. Does anybody have time, or inclination, patience. We poke and prod our lives away, cloying away the time. Averting our gaze. Avoiding the inevitable.

Perhaps it’s me they’re avoiding. The dishevelled guy taking photos of heaters, riding the rails like a zone 6 hobo. It’s nice out here. The carriages are mostly empty, the windows wide angle panorama of rolling fields and woods call to me, as I scan for birds and big cats, idly transecting the m25 like the psychogeographer of cliche.

Dylan White’s website / twitter
Samantha Whates on twitter

Record Release: Outcrops, by Spaceship

An extended Trailer for the new Spaceship LP 'Outcrops', featuring excerpts from the tracks 'Whirlaw Stones (delta) and 'Bride Stones (glacier)'. Album available to order from www.wiaiwya.bandcamp.com

Listened to by Paul Scraton:

Spaceship is Mark Williamson, a musician and sound artist based in West Yorkshire, and today marks the release of ‘Outcrops’, a site-specific, haunting and melodic album that is not only inspired by the landscapes of northern England but was recorded there. The sandstone outcrops can be found above the town of Todmorden, and the album was recorded in place, with Williamson taking his synth up into the rocks to create the pieces encased in small caves. Each of the tracks on the album is named for its location and incorporates field recordings and found sounds, and was also created to evoke a particular phase in the geological history of the outcrops – Orchan Rocks evokes the Ocean, Bride Stones the Glacier and so on. This story is also lyrically told in the sleeve notes, describing the rivers as they “surged from the uplands,” the “peaceful, aquatic interlude between the ever-shifting chaos,” and the ice as it “plucked and scraped and tore at the land…”  

Crossing the Pennine hills a few weeks ago it came to me once again that how we interpret a landscape, how it makes us feel, is tied to what we know about it – the stories we have heard and what we bring with us as we approach it. The same can be true of works of art. What we know of the author or the painter, the musician or the photographer can shape our interpretation of a work, whether we want it to or not. The knowledge of how it was created feeds into our experience. I sit at my desk in Berlin and listen to the Spaceship album and I can picture the sandstone outcrops and the fields beneath the moors as behind the melodies I’m sure I can hear the wind blow and the birds call. Are they there? I’m not sure. But I know one thing: the next time I cross the Pennine hills the tracks from this album will echo. I have added to my collection, the one that helps me understand a place. The hills will be different somehow. That’s the power of art, the power of music. The power of storytelling, in all its forms.

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‘Outcrops’ by Spaceship is available on 12” and download, and is released on 24 May 2019 by wiaiwya.

Mark Williamson on twitter
Spaceship on soundcloud