The Lighthouse Invites the Storm: Malcolm Lowry's Wirral

Alan Dunn, Martin Heslop & Jeff Young in collaboration with Mariners' Park.

To mark the 70th anniversary of Malcolm Lowry's seminal novel Under the Volcano (1947) artists Alan Dunn, Martin Heslop and Jeff Young developed a series of performances and posters reconnecting Lowry with his New Brighton birthplace. Working with retired seafarers from the Wirral and sound artists from Yorkshire and Mexico, the artists re-imagined New Brighton's nautical landmarks with musical stormscapes and lyrical poems driven by Mersey tides.

This new CD captures The Lighthouse Invites the Storm performances and has been produced in a hand-numbered edition of 1000 with 16p full colour stapled booklet printed on 150gsm gloss art paper, packed in a six-panel plastic-less full colour 300gsm card digifile with standard machine varnish. Designed by Alan Dunn, recorded at SORT Rehearsal Rooms, Liverpool and produced by Martin Heslop. This is cantaudio040.

Across the 42-minute soundscape, Jeff Young's words fuse with Heslop's soundscapes, reflecting upon Lowry's leaving of Liverpool at a young age, the empty River Mersey seen by the old men taking model ships to New Brighton every Sunday and the retired seafarers who navigated Vietnam in Shell tankers as we landed on the moon.

The Lighthouse Invites the Storm also features Mersey Wylie, Vidar Norheim and Jack Roberts, including an exclusive recording of his original Rain.

The CD design echoes Dunn's Black Dogs poster suite installed for ten months at Liverpool Lime Street, inviting around 40 million viewings of dark reflective images of Lowry's eyes, black dogs, lighthouses and storms. See here for The Lighthouse Invites the Storm project page with audio-visual documentation.

To request a copy of the CD, email Alan Dunn at alandunn44@gmail.com. The CD itself is free but contributions to P&P most welcome:

Payment by PayPal

There will be further iterations of The Lighthouse Invites the Storm at this year's Lowry Lounge on Saturday 27 October, see www.thebluecoat.org.uk for further details. See here for Young's recent BBC Radio 3 Kaleidoscope of Muses series and previous collaborations include LONDON ROAD: The ballad of RAY + JULIE and SuperBlock and A552 HEX, with the latter soon to be presented as part of the Liverpool Independents Biennial.



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