Trebah Garden have teamed up with local sound artist Kim Zip to produce a suite of music inspired by the beauty, ambience and history of the valley.
During January and February Trebah will be hosting a very private view of Kim's work, which will be available on mp3 player for visitors to enjoy and have the opportunity to experience each piece in the area of the garden which inspired its creation. The Suite can be down loaded to your personal player or phone prior to visiting the garden or for the less technically minded MP3 players and headphones will be available to borrow pre-loaded with the music and with simple instructions.
The collaboration began back in the summer of 2012 when Kim first visited the garden and was inspired by the sub-tropical surroundings. Kim Zip is an artist and writer. He lives and works in Hayle, exhibiting from studios in Cornwall and London. 'The Garden', the name of Kim's suite, was conceived in conjunction with Trebah as part of his Bomb Everyone multi-media and sound art project. It constitutes the first artistic collaboration of 2013 for Trebah. A year in which many other interesting projects and installations shall follow as part of Trebah 175th anniversary celebrations.
Kim says of the piece: "It's a time honoured notion to be inspired by nature to write music. So I was really pleased when Nigel and the team at Trebah agreed to work with me on a score for their beautiful garden. Awesome has become over-used slang, but there can be no other word to describe the scene that greets visitors as they walk through the entrance of Trebah. It was an intense, dreamy experience taking in the garden and getting impressions for tracks."
Kim explained: "Every tune in the Trebah Suite was improvised as quickly as possible after visiting a particular spot. I found you just couldn't do it any other way: if I left it a couple of days, the result would be more polished, but it was weak, so I lost all that in the edit. Because of this, a lot of the surviving numbers are naive, while others are punched through with simple hooks. They are all tunes which went through my head as I stood here or there: while the Trebah theme also works in physical melodies of nature we can all hear."
"Also, each track in the Suite is the product of a single nights work: it rarely takes me less than a day to build a Bomb Everyone piece, and with these, by the time I got back to the studio, clutching scribbled notes and desperately humming some new anthem I didn't want to forget, there was very little prospect of any kip before dawn! Trebah is a powerful place, and in the end it scored itself. None of these musical impressions could ever be as intensely beautiful as nature, just as no piece of art can ever directly emulate our endlessly multi-foiled lives, but I hope these vignettes will work as prisms for some small vestiges of Trebah's natural beauty, and serve to remind everyone who knows and loves the Garden of the wonderful experience of being here."
The exhibition starts on the 12th of January
