Recently I made a trip to Scotland to make field recordings and a 16mm film of a series of waterfalls on the River Clyde an hour south of Glasgow.
Cora Linn at 90ft is the highest waterfall in a series of three which break the course of the river in New Lanark, South Lanarkshire. Widely recognised as an area of natural beauty, the waterfalls were used as a subject in the Romantic era by William Wordsworth in the poem Composed at Cora Linn and J.M.W Turner in the painting Falls of Clyde.
Falls of Clyde - J.M.W Turner
The area is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, the town of New Lanark was reformed as an experiment in Utopian - Socialism by Welsh philanthropist Robert Owen during the Industrial Revolution. The power of the water harnessed to drive cotton mills and the adjacent buildings housing mill workers and their families. Today the force of the water continues to run Bonnington Power station, the first hydro-electric power station in Scotland.
When we arrived in New Lanark it was covered in a blanket of heavy snow and resembled a winter scene the likes of I'd only ever witnessed on a Christmas card. Fortunately the falls were still roaring as I had been worried they would be frozen, putting an end to my hopes of recording their sound. We took a walk from our hotel along the path upstream to look for possible locations for the film shoot.
During our walk I made field recordings using bi-naural microphones to record the waterfalls and an elecro-magnetic coil to pick up the hum of the power station. The recordings will be recomposed into one track which will exist as a CD and constitute as part of the soundtrack to the film.
