In Four Tales, sound and architecture unite in a conversation that expands senses and entangles our rhythms with all other pulses that surround us. A city aware of itself.
In the album, floating between documentation and imagined drifts, urban infrastructures and bodies of water are explored as entangled entities to be carefully tended to. Rooted in listening as an act of care, the album takes four distinct approaches to water-based sound journeys: three solo tracks and a collaborative one.
In Four Tales Matilde Meireles expands on the work she composed as part of DRIFT, a collaborative project centred on a modular, site-specific floating pavilion and public space in Belfast. DRIFT was commissioned by Belfast City Council as part of the Belfast 2024 cultural programme. It brought together two local architecture studios (OGU and MMAS) with sound artist Matilde Meireles.
The project was conceived as a “floating instrument”, an open-ended public space that fosters new perspectives on city-river connections. By creating opportunities for stillness and attentive listening, it opened dialogues between people and place. Its surface, draped in cotton ropes of varying blue shades, gently demarcated the boundary between interior and exterior. The structure, built from reusable aluminium scaffolding, floated at two sites, Stranmillis Weir and Belfast City Centre, throughout August and September 2024.
While the floating pavilion was inherently community-driven — creating spaces for new connections and shared plural experiences — Four Tales translates this communal ethos into sonic form, maintaining a fluidity that extends beyond human narratives. It suggests sound and extended forms of listening as ways of forming community not only among people, but within the broader ecological network of which we are part. Four Tales is also a personal project, entailing eight years of living in Belfast and spending a vast amount of time with the River Lagan.
In tale One, field recordings trace the water's dynamic movement in its many forms across different times and geographies: the gentle flows of the River Lagan in Belfast, the River Avon in Wiltshire, the River Tejo in Lisbon and the River Tambre in Spain; the calm sea in Greece; a storm in Mozambique’s capital; and the crisp, icy surfaces following snowfall in Wiltshire. These sounds reflect water’s permeant presence intricately woven with the granular textures of DRIFT’s cotton rope and scaffolding structure as they respond to the River Lagan’s shifting patterns. Recorded and composed by Matilde Meireles, the track stems from the headphone-based installation Movements of Water Between Atmosphere, Land and Sea, experienced by visitors of DRIFT during the pavilion's public activation programme.
Two combines the site-specific exploratory works made for two mooring points on the River Lagan, creating a continuous experience that moves from one location to the other. The journey evolves from the subtle, faint life beneath the River Lagan’s surface and the rhythmic patterns of movements of water, through atmospheric phenomena, electromagnetic interference and vibrations from metal structures lining the river. The micro and macro movements in the landscape are set alongside richer underwater ecosystems and imagined animal calls, as well as tonal and rhythmic pulses deeply rooted in the original recorded materials. Recorded and composed by Matilde Meireles, this track reimagines the listening sessions Matilde created for DRIFT as a sonic journey between two locations along the River Lagan: Stranmillis Weir and Belfast City Centre.
In tale Three, Meireles compiles raw biodiversity recordings collected around Stranmillis Weir into a looping, exploratory narrative that examines the rich yet incomplete nature of field recording. The recordings include animal calls, animal movements and the occasional sound distortion. A narrator catalogues both recorded species and those present but absent from the sound files — exploring the gaps between actual presence and what technology can document in a fleeting period of time. Composed by Matilde Meireles with recordings by Wild Belfast, this is a result of the collaborative and exploratory approach to cross-disciplinary mapping, where DRIFT’s team worked with Belfast-based conservation advocacy group Wild Belfast to document biodiversity around the pavilion. Wild Belfast used a Wildlife Acoustics Song Meter to map the species heard within a 500-metre radius of DRIFT across a 4-day period.
Play the Space was originally performed live at DRIFT on the 15th of September 2024, by Conor McAuley (percussion), Matilde Meireles (field recordings and electronics), Michael Speers (percussion), and Paul Stapleton (tromba marina and amplified objects). The performance combined solo and collective improvisation, with attention paid to the acoustic properties of the space and the surrounding environment. Four is an excerpt taken from the live performance, mixed by Michael Speers from Oisín Hughes’s live recording. The concert was curated by Moving on Music.
The accompanying Riso print poster was created by Rachel O’Grady (OGU Architects) in collaboration with Matilde Meireles. A site plan is drawn at the level of the river’s surface (where visitors to DRIFT were located), encompassing the limits of the recordings made by Wild Belfast (a 500-meter radius). This base drawing then became a vehicle for O’Grady and Meireles to discuss the differences between their practises when designing in and for public space. Creating this print highlighted a necessary divergence in their perception of the temporality of the space created, and the resultant differences in their planning of the way that each visitor might experience the work in that space and time. The use of text: descriptions of the recorded sounds written by Meireles, allows the sounds to be present in the image without appearing static, sequential or tied to a point in space. Rather, the words appear clustered and incomplete, a snapshot of a moment unfolding, partially incoherent.
Thank you to my DRIFT teammates, OGU Architects (Rachel O’Grady and Chris Upson) and MMAS (Fearghal Murray and Garreth McMahon); to Paul Stapleton, Conor McAuley, Michael Speers and Moving on Music for a wonderful collaboration; to all the communities formed with DRIFT (human and non-human); to all of DRIFT’s project partners, in particular Adam McFall, Conor McKinney and Perla Mansor of Wild Belfast (Three); to Michael Speers for lending his voice to the narration of Three; to SARC: Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, Queen’s University Belfast for being my second home and supporting my work on DRIFT; to Queen’s University Belfast Research and Enterprise Directorate for their support; to the wonderful Peter Gallagher, the River Manager, Martin King, the River Warden, and their team at the Department for Communities NI.
More on DRIFT at www.oguarchitects.com/work/drift