“In 2018 I wrote Earwitness – a collection of essays about hearing loss, tinnitus, and written sounds.
This led to a PhD that I’ve just finished, researching sonic experience in contemporary fiction. As an ongoing side project, I’ve been wondering about the relationships between autoimmune disease and sound.
Having rheumatoid arthritis means I regularly hear certain sounds that others might not, like the clicks of auto injector pens and the clonks of syringes dropping into sharps bins. These sounds are the seeds of the Pharmaceutical Percussion project, which is a sonic celebration of mass-produced, non-organic medicine.
The debut album was recorded at Capel Y Graig, as a duet with an off-kilter metronome and myself using tables and floorboards as percussion in this huge reverberant space. It’s also a sort of weird companion to an article I wrote that tried to define the concept of the pulpit’s audible shadow.
In future I hope Pharmaceutical Percussion will grow into an occasional collaborative thing, where people gather to shake their pills and tablets in playful opposition to the pharmaphobic health ideologies that are popular right now.”