FOLLOW RORY GREEN

MEET RORY GREEN

Rory Green is an electronic musician and sound artist from Glasgow interested in creating sounds with multiple layers of interpretation. He’ll employ his talents to create experimental, ambient music to accompany and magnify the project’s final artworks.

Who are you? What do you do?

My name’s Rory Green, I work in sonic arts, mainly with ambient/experimental music and sound.

My work has previously often reflected on the climate situation and working with the cohort for the past few months has informed my perspective on how others view the foreboding crisis. It’s been interesting finding mindset compromises between our respective stances on the problem, and I’ve enjoyed learning about different art practices in coping with it, and talking about the role art can play in promoting awareness around the issue and encouraging people to explore the most effective routes in which to take action.

It felt good contributing to the noise around COP26. I’ve started to see a change in how informed people are, (specifically around the 2021 IPCC report,) which I’d initially expected nobody to hear about, and a surprising amount did.

What is your project about?

My role in the cohort was to take part in our collaborative activities whilst recording audio, as well as collaborating on concepts the others had come up with and helping to breathe additional life into their works with music and sound design, as well as conceptualising my own works with certain members of the cohort.

The project’s pretty multifaceted. Some examples of works I’ve been in and what they’re about:

• Poetry EP with Taiye - pretty explicitly pessimistic about the future of the climate across the world, focusing on third world countries and how their current reality with regards to the crisis will be on our doorstep soon enough.

• All stuff with David - basically looking at the different ways in which different people can process the crisis at hand, tongue in cheek look at how normal people struggle to process the magnitude of it.

• Physalia - film with Sean and Kate, basically indulging in a melancholy revelry in the natural world around us, and how I can no longer experience the inherent beauty and solace within it, without being haunted by the oncoming crisis.

• Short music film with Sean - a number of perspective concepts thought up by Sean set to music and film. Perspectives include things like wondering what the future humanity will leave behind might look like, considering temporal shifts in the global climate, and the undoing of our natural life support systems.

Where do you currently work from?

I currently work from Glasgow, but like to travel around the north of Scotland, and work rurally when possible. My work takes place between my home studio; where I compose and do sound design, messing around with software, standalone synths and modular, as well as out in the field; collecting sounds and taking portable synthesis interfaces to make music and sound in rural settings. I’ve really taken to this recently actually, going out into the wild with a foley recorder and an OP-1, wandering until I find some sounds, and eventually a nice place to sit, and then sit there and make ambient music. The OP-1 is a pretty wonderful piece of kit, its basically like a toy, so keeps everything really playful and fun.

What challenges are you facing?

What I found predominantly challenging was balancing the severity my own artistic intentions wanted to express with the attitudes of the others. With Taiye it was easy - we both seem to feel pretty morbidly about the situation. But working with some of the others, with the explicit intention of trying to find positivity and humour in the crisis, was much harder.

What have you learnt in the Climate Change commission so far?

I’ve learnt a lot about different perspectives people have when responding to the climate crisis. From rejecting the reality of it, to letting it manifest as deep existential depression, its a very broad spectrum.