A pilgrimage into the specifics: site, sound, scent
Timothea Armour on Counterflows 2026
Timothea Armour is a writer and artist living in Leith. She is part of radio art co-op Radiophrenia, intermittently helps run Rhubaba Choir, is a wedding and funeral celebrant and also works at Filmhouse cinema.
Counterflows is an internationally acclaimed Glasgow-based contemporary music festival that celebrates challenging and thought provoking work in the context of what might be called experimental music; supporting marginal music practice within a wide array of different genres and approaches to music and sound. Taking place annually, the festival features artists from Scotland, UK and around the world, and celebrates and explores culture on a local and international scale.
Photo: Tomas Hermoso tomashermoso.co.uk
The smell of a wet piano half buried in the ground is very specific. Give or take the particular petrichor of the soil in which the piano is buried, and maybe the brand of varnish that was used on the wooden parts, as the rain starts to soak in and the keys swell to the scent of damp lacquered wood, soil and metal. This is what a Piano Garden smells like.
In archive footage used in Sam Green’s portrait, ‘A Film About Listening’ which was commissioned by Counterflows, it is 1970 and Annea Lockwood is visiting a piano that Green has planted in a garden in Essex, dug in alongside fast-growing trees and creepers, intended to subsume the piano—its sound changing as the plants do.
In April 2026, in a location specified to Counterflows visitors by a red arrow drawn with a computer mouse or trackpad onto a screenshot from a mapping app, the composer’s score is followed once more. The arrow points to a community garden next to the Forth and Clyde Canal and a piano, already beyond repair before its internment, is being rained on. People have trailed up the side of the canal and down the embankment to visit it, and intermittently strike it with the sort of mallet you might use to drive tent pegs into the ground. The keys that still have some movement in them are played by the visitors too, some of whom are wearing rustling plastic rain ponchos. It’s April and it’s been a cold spring so far, so the planting is only just beginning to grow. Sometimes when the exposed metal strings are struck their resonance is as open as they are to the air; sometimes the sound is dulled by the earth.
Elsewhere in Green’s film, it’s 2021 and Annea is listening to her neighbour and collaborator, the Housatonic River, using a hydrophone. Something on the riverbed is making a rhythmic bubbling sound she’s never heard before, and the headphones are passed to Green and then the rest of the film crew in turn, so they can listen too.
As the film’s audience—in a lecture theatre deep in Glasgow University’s sports centre, past vending machines and gym changing rooms—we hear what the crew are hearing through the headphones and hydrophone too.
Another evening, and this time the smell is cherry-scented air freshener. It emanates so thickly and pink-ly from the entirely pink-painted toilets in the community hall’s basement it reaches up the stairwells and onto the balcony with its fold down seats. From the vantage point on the balcony, the sound is of two harps being played conversationally by Aine O’Dwyer and Rhodri Davies, but also the gassy click of beer cans being opened and metallic crinkles of a grip on a can being adjusted slightly. The passing sound of a siren outside is as much a part of the composition as any other. Other collaborations are noisy enough that the sounds from any one source are indistinct. One member of Remont Pomp sings along to a Polish pop song on headphones; in the inflection of her voice, we can hear the emotional weight of what she hears.
After Hexakaidecagon’s performance in the Art School Student Union, everyone is talking about a startling sound, a meteoric thud, made by rolled paper banners as they hit the floor and unrolled, careening between the feet of the audience. A slighter sound that leads to a smell is that of a struck match. The performer’s script is about fire and the audience are being handed match books. One of these matches being struck was not a planned part of the piece, it later turns out.
The Saturday afternoon crowd shuffles into another, even more cavernous community hall and <3 (Less than Three)’s performance is bedded by the rhythmic windmill squeak of a huge, hand built wooden automata.
Maybe to a trained ear no two pianos or trombones or violins sound the same but seem to be, to some extent, standardised. Other objects, whose primary purpose is not ‘musical instrument’ and are not designed with acoustic properties in mind, can be more distinct. Ali Robertson, performing on Friday afternoon, is mourning a broken string on an egg slicer; it will be difficult to replace but he plays the egg slicer with its broken string anyway. On Saturday night, non-musical sounds include parcel tape being unrolled by Xiang, of duo Soldier, and then an empty cardboard box scooting across the floor, propelled by and trying to escape from, Xiang’s rotary sander. Later, Ryu Hankil’s electronics are a bit like sitting under a waterfall.
On Sunday, there is breathing; the many breaths of Kings Park Youth Brass working through Rufus Isabel Elliot’s scores, Garazi Navas’ contorting and wriggling accordion bellows and the soft mouth sounds of Uzganc Choir performing a piece by composer Lin Chi-Wei.
A week or so after, a friend who wasn’t at the festival remarks that he was heartened to see, via social media, the excitement and enjoyment of his friends taking in these experiments; communal joy in the singular and weird, something that felt like it went against prevailing conditions. Another, ran into whilst crossing a dancefloor, feels like this edition of the festival is gentle; a balm to wounds Glasgow seems to be struggling to heal.
It’s true, the audience was rapturous—a word often used to describe audiences but this condition is pronounced, feels grateful. The line between audience and artist is anyway quite a soft one at Counterflows. Over the course of the weekend, there was the possibility of joining Agnes Pé’s kazoo choir, Ryu Hankil’s rubber balloon orchestra or Zhao Ziyi’s walking recording piece, or going to play Annea Lockwood’s ‘Piano Garden’. A few items on the programme had been moved because of the CCA’s recent closure but mostly the venues were community halls. The over and mis-use of the word ‘community’ happens as often in art contexts as the word ‘rapturous’ does in review writing, but that is simply what those buildings are called and that is where we are.
Photo: Tomas Hermoso tomashermoso.co.uk
Thanks to Counterflows for supporting Timothea with a ticket to attend the festival.