sonic boom at the hayward gallery is a whole new take on sound in this post-techno universe of clicks, scratches and stolen soundbites. sonic boom delivers an intelligent mix of music/sound and cuts it with the sharp edge of visual arts.

mills' and walton's contribution mantle is a circular chamber sheltering a cylinder of x-rays suspended over a mound of sheep fleeces - a reference to man's place in nature, and his role as a spectacular and worker within it.

accepting that history and memory feed continuity and change, giving shape to living things and substance to our speculations of possible futures, mantle explores the idea of land as force and as a metaphor for transformation, whilst also seeking to articulate a sense of the immense global influence of human impact on the landscape over time. mantle has evolved out of, and is a reflection on, a multitude of inter-related ideas born out of our awareness of the aesthetic of the natural world as being profundly and inextricably political and economic. it dwells on the uneasy and currently unbalanced symbiosis between land as fundamental matter and how we shape it and are in turn shaped by it. occupations, habitations, trade routes and the subsequent exchange of cross-cultural ideas, have all been primarily dictated by the hidden laws of nature's ceaseless flux. in all instances it is the land , the climate and the cynical, relentless processes of the phenomenal world which ultimatly determines our actions.

mantle's larger outer cylinder, a zone of separation, muted as an anechoic chamber, clad in sheep fleeces, suggests a shelter, temporary, ephemeral, at one remove from the shepherd's cloak, the minimum required for respite. sheltered within it is an inner cylinder made of x-rays of human skulls, representing the bothy of charcoal burner, the resin gatherer, the bodger or the willow worker, the leaf-hut of the amazon jungle and the shantytowns of the world's "cardboard cities".

the sonic elements of the work arose out of the contextual roots which anchor and bind the installation. the sound has been conceived so as to create a magnified sense of place, time and emotion, whilst emulating the experience of listening in a landscape, whether it be rural or urban, where one is enveloped in a wide sonic backdrop of indeterminate sounds. sonic material used includes the human (blood flow frequencies, breathing), the mechanical (rock drilling, stone cutting and various industrial machines), the natural (field recordings of rivers, winds, birds, animals) and the found and manipulated (glass and metal, spinning, stone struck, wood beaten, etc). each element has been extensivly treated so as a collectively to evoke an invented, previously unimagined place. five cds each carrying a unique palette of these audio elements, each of different durations, all loop at varying intervals, thereby setting up yet another series of endlessly mixes in real time.

russell mills and ian walton (c)