Breathing out silence, breathing out sound
Breathe Out Silence
Original music by Mariam Rezaei
Remixed by David Harradine
Text by David Harradine and Sam Butler
Spoken by Nora Chlorou
Sound editor Huxley Robinson Butler
Thanks to: Xenia Aidonopoulou, Louisa Borg-Costanzi Potts, Angus at Noatune Studios, Yuko Cheung, Winsome Tam and Joey Chong at WestK, Timothy Wong, Kyle Chung.
Breathe Out Silence was commissioned by British Council Hong Kong for SPARK 2024: Healthy Futures
Our new project Time Keeps The Drummer explores children’s peculiar relationship to time: the time of the body, emotional time, dark time, bright time, sensory time. The time of close focus and wild abandon. The time of letting go. The time of exploration. The time of play.
Before children are taught how to tell the time, their experience of it isn’t linear. It’s not about speed and efficiency. It’s not about productivity. It’s not about obedience to the clock. Time is like the weather, shifting and changing, mercurial. Time is a landscape, to run through, to linger in, to be lost in. Time is excitement and boredom and fear and joy and curiosity and stillness and slowness and racing, twisting, leaping. Time is lying still.
We’ll be premiering Time Keeps The Drummer in Hong Kong in Spring 2025, in partnership with the brilliant learning team at WestK. As part of the development of the project, we visited Hong Kong this October, where we were also invited to lead a workshop on time and rest as part of the British Council’s SPARK festival - an exploration of the impact of arts and culture, education and science on our wellbeing.
For the workshop we made a new audio piece, Breathe Out Silence, combining remixed music from the incredible composer Mariam Rezaei with an original text spoken by a child, which you can listen to on this page.
As the child in the piece says, “I hold the keys to a different way to be in time. I am not yet lost. I remember the dark fluid universe before light and before time, when everything was part of me”.
We teach children how to tell the time. But what can children teach us about time? Can they help us remember how to just be?