Pleased as punch to have this little audio piece featured as the artists project in Issue 70 of Cabinet Magazine: the New York based magazine of art and culture.

I was approached by artist and writer Sally O’Reilly who was guest editing an edition interrogating the Webster’s Timeline History series – a preposterous collection of 90,000 publications that each collate material scraped from the internet under different search terms. Sally invited me to choose an edition and produce something in response. ‘Grumbling: 415BC -2007’ appealed for its ridiculousness and audio potential. And yet a trawl through the contents revealed some fascinating historical trends.

I built the piece around entries to do with: grumbling against oppressive power relations, culminating in revolution; sermonizing against grumbling in the 1850s and 1860s; grumbling winds in wonderfully sonic late-nineteenth-century storm scenes; and grumbling as a precursor to regime change in early twenty-first-century news reports. I read out excerpts from these entries and then added some grumbly ambient audio, including (for part 1) a recording I made of bees inside a local bee hive.