Viv Corringham is a British, New York-based vocal and sound artist. Her practice explores relations between voice, place, and walking, responding with sung improvisations to both natural and urban soundscapes, and exploring themes of home, memory, and personal belonging. She studied and performed with Pauline Oliveros and teaches her Deep Listening method.
Corringham maintained a soundwalking practice for decades, and her first Soundwalkscapes album (Flaming Pines, 2024) invited the listener to join Corringham as she encountered her surroundings using her voice and body, with field recordings and electronics. In listening, we move with her through five journeys in New York State, and one in London. These walks had one self-imposed rule: on the first Monday of every month, beginning in 2023, wherever Corringham found herself, she took a walk. She recorded the walk, the environment, and her improvised, sung, wordless responses to the sounds and situations. She captured multiple, overlapping versions of each space, with its polyphony of multiple voices, as well as her different responses.
The second volume of Soundwalkscapes continues this project on the months July to December, with three more journeys in New York (rainy day in Sag Harbor; Museum of Modern Art; and tunnels in Central Park), one more in London (Lost river Walbrook), one in Prespes, Greece and and another one in Muenster (the train station). Corringham assembled the field recordings from her walks, as well as her immediate vocal responses and sharp, playful observations, always sensitive to changes in weather and social atmosphere, and edited and composed her soundwalkscapes. This is her unique way of reflecting, or daydreaming about these unique locations as imaginary spaces. It is a priceless lesson in deep, modest, and exploratory listening that awakens our deepest memories and our free-associative imagination.
Jack Chuter (of the Crucial Listening podcast), who contributed liner notes, concludes that Corringham’s «presence enriches our intimacy with these spaces, conveying the warmth of a harbour-side cafe, giving voice to the raindrop sidling down a window, swelling into the subterranean, illuminating the distances. She unravels the simplistic notion that to listen deeply requires the subject to remain silent».
Eyal Hareuveni
Viv Corinngham (voice, electronics, field recordings)
