Lock concerts on the Danube

 European Sound Delta  (Summer 2008) was a boat journey on two of Europe’s most densely  trafficked rivers, the Danube and the Rhine.  Over Summer 2008 two boats sailed slowly upstream from the Black and North Seas to the final destination point in Strasbourg. Along the way resident artists composed sound pieces and experimented with alternative forms of radio inspired by the journey. With the radio artists Knut Aufermann and Sarah Washington we joined the boat from Linz (Austria) to Regensburg (Germany) and begun to research the use of basic sonar techniques and echo location to try and to make an audio image of our surroundings. We used a very simple sonar system consisting of speakers facing out from the boat, megaphones, battery run electronic instruments, a harmonica, our voices and microphones that picked up the reflections from the shoreline and the concrete walls of the locks.

As a group of very diverse radio practioners what interested us most the acoustic space  these imposing vault-like 25 metre high locks provided us with… it became our auditorium, each passage of time enclosed within  an improvised concert where we played along with the creaks and groans of the lock gates, and the resonant sound that bounced off the huge moss-covered concrete walls.  Our audience ? Our fellow barge crew, a lost crow, some German lock keepers and  the Serbian captains commanding the gigantic cargo boats West.

You can hear some of our recordings made in the locks here.

You can see some more photos taken by Sarah Washington  here

And you can read Jean-Philippe Renoult's log (in French only)  here