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Seven Songs for Seven Signs

There's a series of 16 rusting 1960s signposts dotted around Dent Road on the Bricknell council estate in Hull. They do not appear anywhere else on the estate, just here. It wasn't really until  2015 that I began to notice them and, as the years passed, they have taken on a strange, totemic power in my imagination.

The signposts lost their signs years ago and today they stand in silence, signifying nothing. They mean what we want them to mean, and their meaninglessness is their power. To feel the signs we need to learn, to become irrational -- to see what is not there.

The sign that can be seen is not the eternal sign.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.

In 2022 I was inspired to write a song each for six of these signs. The songs seemed naturally to take on a flavour of life and death. In early 2024 my partner passed away and my life, my soul, every inch of me, was torn apart. After a few months of numbed paralysis a final song came to me, and so the project became Seven Songs for Seven Signs. 

I'm not happy with any of the songs as I am neither a musician nor an audio technician. They mostly sound crude by today's standards. But they are an interesting record of my journey.

I made audio field recordings of each sign by scraping and banging them and these recordings have been integrated into their signs' respective songs. I have also conducted a ritual at each sign to bind it to its song. So each song has been geographically locked to its respective sign. The songs can be listened to anywhere but the only way a sign's song may truly be perceived is to stand by the sign and physically touch it. 

Below is a map showing the location of each sign. The solid black numbers signify that there is a song attached to that sign. The songs may be listened to below.

© 2021 Matt Hopper Art

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