Margaret Salmon – Clouded
Birthed in sadness, a teardrop falls from a feeling eye into The River Kelvin, descending to its littered riverbed. Hitting the bottom, the teardrop is transformed into fresh water. It lingers atop a murky soil for a time, then follows a current up through the Kelvin’s aquatic soup to its surface. There, warmed by sun and summer heat, our teardrop evaporates. It ascends in a hot thermal push up through the air and joins a cumulus cloud.
Margaret Salmon’s ‘Clouded’ (2020) is a listener's meditation on watery feeling, air flow, horizons, moisture and the sky; a cyclic journey that begins at the Kelvin Bridge in Glasgow’s West End and follows the river to the Clyde Estuary and skywards. Using field recordings, spoken word, musical sounds and based upon scientific and aural intuitions Margaret Salmon presents a listener's companion to cumulus clouds, tears, rivers and more. In this imaginative rumination on interdependency and restorative release she traces the path of water from our terrestrial bodies into the sky, then back to earth. Clouds migrate, moving freely above the earth. Border-free and nationless, they are anti-commodities that redeem and destroy, without recourse to human narratives or preoccupations. Clouds are badass. Learning about clouds can be enlightening, but the eye and the mind can appreciate their nebulous configurations without any prior instruction.
This audio guide is intended to encourage and support the wonder of cloud gazing – one of the simplest and most enduring forms of human observation – and to share thoughts about water and transformation in nature.
Salmon's audio meditation can be listened to outdoors, indoors, up in the air, underground.
Written, performed and edited by Margaret Salmon.
Sound Recordist: Pete Smith.
Additional Sound: Margaret Salmon.
With thanks to Katrina Brown, Chloe Reith, Ulysses, Eglantine and Philomena Salmon Wiand, The River Kelvin and Glaswegian skies.
Mastering by Stephan Mathieu / Schwebung Mastering.
From 'In the open', track released August 21, 2020.
© Margaret Salmon
All rights reserved.