My Inspiration: Whitevanperil – Kings Meadow

North-Eastern noisemaker WhiteVanPeril releases a new two track album, Kings Meadow (via . This ‘location soundtrack’ inspired by walks in the region take into consideration the myths and legends of the area and incorporate field recordings taken on route. The first track, The Dredging Of Kings Meadow, is a harsh industrial affair and is followed by a more reflective aftermath with Echos Flowing.

Here, the artist tells us about what inspired the music…

Kings Meadow is the second in an ongoing series of works focusing on the history of various areas around the North East of England, both real and imagined. In this case, the release considers the now long lost Kings Meadow Island that was located between Elswick and Dunston on the River Tyne.

The Dredging Of Kings Meadow

Most tracks that I create begin with several walks around the area, with a notebook and some way of taking photos & recording sounds. From there I start to build up the track with layers of sound taken directly from the recordings or created (on guitar and synth) inspired by. This first track does in fact begin with the slowed sound of several of the industrial buildings located along the banks of the river in that area.

Taking a slightly psychogeographic approach to the area, my mind and work often drift off into a more open interpretation of history, placing ‘the listener’ onto the island itself as it was dredged sometime around 1850. As the track evolves, the sounds start to break, distort, get louder and louder as industry clears away the land. The music here becomes almost self-destructive and close to falling apart, crumbling, collapsing under its own progress.

Eventually, the noise washes away, memory fades and we end with another slowed field recording of a boat passing.

“Progress is a comfortable disease”: E.E Cummings

Echos Flowing

The second track is a more reflective moment. While the previous track was firmly in the noise/power electronics genre, ‘Echos Flowing’ is more ambient. The calm after the storm. The sound of the river flowing free.

I filmed (and subsequently lost) a walk from Dunston to the Quayside, lost in thoughts of the echoes from Kings Meadow flowing off downriver. So this piece was a soundtrack to that walk, which ends as it does just under the Tyne Bridge could well be a starting point for a future release.