Listening to the performances on this album, one is drawn microscopically into the smallest details. Sounds are close-miced, acoustic, and full frequency. The diaphragms of our speaker cones and ear-drums are invited into the details of diaphragms of hand drums, torsos, and microphones in a way that feels anatomical and intimately visceral. When John Cage entered an anechoic chamber in 1951 he reported that the only sounds he could hear in such intimate acoustic surroundings were those of his own body, including the low hum of his blood circulating. It is exactly that feeling of the close-to-the-ear hum in a direct sense (all the works on this album take Folkestone born physician William Harvey’s pioneering text on the blood system as textual material), and a figurative sense (all pieces are constructed as loops) that permeates Sam Belinfante’s overarching conception of On the Circulation of Blood; a rich and complex multimedia performance and installation work for the 2021 Folkestone Triennale.

The music here, commissioned and directed by Belinfante forms only a part of this project, but as a single perspective into the work what comes across immediately is the presence of the body in these pieces. Each is designed to be realised as interlocking and permutable collections of duets for children, amateur choirs, or the small team of professional musicians featured here. Sounds emanate physically from this figurative body of participants; in Elaine Mitchener’s BloodCirlcesEarsWhistles we hear voices, breath, throats and spittle. In others we encounter cloth-flapping biceps, the hammering of staffs on cobblestones, and fingernails on kalimbas. Scores do exist, but the music is to be taught and learnt aurally, like a catch or a round; intrinsically embodied and communal music making that weaves individuals' voices together.

At its premiere, On the Circulation of Blood united local performers from age seven (children from St Peter’s School) to 70 at the old fishing-net drying grounds; a site high up in the town that itself affords a view of Folkestone harbour and its bustling piscatorial woop and warf.

In their joyful simplicity many of the pieces here feel like folksongs. Josephine Stephenson’s earworm of a tune quickly familiarises itself like an old nursery rhyme, Sarah Dacey’s rhythmic patterns seem like playground games, my own piece draws on ritualistic customs, and Bernhard Schimpelsberger provides a traditional perspective far beyond the British Isles. When experienced in conjunction with Belinfante’s own theatrical staging, and his erection of a vast sculpture of scaffold poles, fishing nets, illuminated buoys and speakers, On the Circulation of Blood might best be understood as a modern-day mystery play. Like those amateur, tradesmen-made theatrical spectacles this too is a work that perambulates across the city, and is built from the very stuff of its surroundings. It is fete-like but encrusted in a wealth of associations, meanings, and possibilities. The echoes of this strange play continue to reverberate in Belinfante’s striking sonic-sculpture that stands as a humble lodestar beckoning curious pedestrians with fragments of these recordings presented with another kind of intimacy. Held together by the clave pulses of Ben Oliver’s Beacons, derived from the heartbeats of the performers and further triggering the pulsing of the glowing red orbs, a listener standing under the netted proscenium surrounded by these voices is made subtly aware of their own presence within a space – a body, a town, a lifecycle, a community.

Neil Luck, 2022