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this edition of framework:afield, entitled channel, has been produced in the uk by stephen shiell. for more of stephen’s work see https://stephenshiell.co.uk. producer’s notes:
These soundscapes are shaped by an acoustic ecology approach, where listening functions as an ecological and relational practice rather than documentation. Developed through extended, site-responsive engagement with the Channelsea Basin, the recordings emerge from long periods of attentive listening to the river and its surrounding infrastructure. Over time, the soundscape reveals its own rhythms, timbres, and latent musical structures—natural reverbs, delays, loops, and resonances produced by the space itself. Field recordings and live streams were captured using a range of listening devices, including hydrophones, geophones, contact microphones, radio transmitters and receivers, and bat detectors. These tools extend perception beyond human hearing, translating submerged, ultrasonic, vibrational, and electromagnetic activity into sound, and presenting the basin as an interconnected acoustic system.
The Channelsea is a tidal tributary of the Thames, situated within a post-industrial landscape that includes abandoned chemical works and one of Europe’s largest outfall sewers. Within this environment, the recordings bear witness to conditions of neglect, waste, and infrastructural residue, while remaining attentive to subtle processes of ecological recovery. Listening becomes an act of attunement—to what is submerged, overlooked, and quietly regenerating.
Part 1: Confluence
This track is composed from remotely captured above-ground sounds of Channelsea Island, recorded as an act of attentive listening that seeks to register presence while respecting the site’s post-industrial rewilding. Avoiding physical intervention, the recordings acknowledge the island as a wilderness shaped by abandonment, where ecological processes unfold beyond human occupation. Alongside audible environmental sound, the work brings forward hidden vibrational fields—radio frequencies, echolocation, and the energetic traces of photosynthetic activity—extending listening into more-than-human and electromagnetic dimensions of the site. These signals reveal an expanded ecology in which biological, technological, and atmospheric forces coexist. The track unfolds across a 24-hour cycle, observing the island at different temporal thresholds. The work resists the notion of absence: the island remains sonically inhabited by nonhuman life, infrastructural residue, and the continuous activity of the electromagnetic sphere.Part 2: Conduit
stephen shiell, 2026.02
This track draws on—and deliberately unsettles—the meditative practice of listening to a babbling brook, a practice that appears in Zen and ancient Sanskrit texts as early as the 9th century. Traditionally associated with contemplation, purification, and attunement to nature, this listening practice is here redirected toward an overlooked and disavowed acoustic environment: the urban sewer system. The installation reveals an underworld through a dense soundscape of sewer pipes, inviting the listener to “meditate” on the flow of sewage—material we have historically rendered invisible by burying it underground and exporting it into distant waterways. In this reversal, what is meant to be hidden becomes audible, and what is framed as waste becomes a site of attention. The pipes function as resonant chambers, carrying choruses and fragmented voices that are shaped by the infrastructure itself. As water is pushed through the system by the pumping station, the pipes amplify and modulate its movement into an unexpected melodic register. The work reflects on municipal infrastructure not merely as a conduit, but as an active sonic body—one that collapses distinctions between nature and industry, ritual and utility, contemplation and contamination.