The Storm Cone

Laura Daly

Artwork Description:

Tracing the sites of lost bandstands in their final days of mass popularity, The Storm Cone charts the fading away of a brass band during the interwar years. To begin, a breathtaking life-size AR bandstand appears - revealing a band’s last performance as a full ensemble. Lucy Pankhurst’s commissioned score builds and returns to a single note as the user moves around the bandstand and amongst the absent musicians inside - ambisonic sounds altering according to their proximity. From the powerful, collective sound of the band, the departed musicians are followed into eight binaural spatial sound works by Laura Daly, where fragile solo phrases merge and mutate in new environments. History, fiction, artifice and reality combine to confront the present with its past. Taking its name from Kipling’s poem that forewarned of WWII, The Storm Cone considers key aspects of the interwar period and reshaping of UK communities. Brass bands, with strong industrial, religious and militaristic associations, lost many musicians to both World Wars, and the intervening years of shellshock, unemployment, economic migrancy, and industrial action. Their survival and the survival of brass music tells a story of working-class life during this epoch. Life, music and creative legacy sustained by breath. As the band’s sound lingers in an absent-minded hum or whistle, it’s an imprint and portal to past times. Imbued with a sense of both loss and celebration – this immersive experience also contemplates the cyclical nature of history, including the current rise in populism, extremism, racism and antisemitism.