Striking a chord with Tunnel motorists

Feb 19 2008 by Vicky Anderson, Liverpool Daily Post

music for the tunnels

A UNIQUE art and music project inspired by the exact time it takes to travel through the Mersey Tunnels has been launched.

Soundtrack For A Mersey Tunnel is a CD compilation put together by Wirral-based artist Alan Dunn, who came up with the concept on his daily bus ride.

Mr Dunn, a regular user of the number 433, considered the journey and the ethereal nature of the two minutes and 33 seconds under the river.

He told the Daily Post: “I was taking this bus journey every day, twice a day for years, and I just had this joke of an idea to produce a soundtrack for that journey.

“Being in the tunnel has this quality of being an ‘inbetween’ space, perfect for daydreaming, and on the bus I’d see a lot of people listening to their own stuff. I wondered what it would be like if everyone was listening to the same thing.”

Mr Dunn successfully applied for funding and set about attracting anyone interested in submitting work exactly two minutes 33 seconds in length.

There was interest from around the world, and Mr Dunn chose as many tracks as he could fit on a CD – from such established names as Pete Wylie to a choir of tunnel employees specially recorded for the project.

Designed to be listened to while travelling through the Kingsway Tunnel, only 433 copies of the CD are being made, and 233 of them will be given away free of charge by Merseytravel to users of the tunnel and the general public.

The project forms part of the 67 projects series of newly produced digital audio and billboard artworks, supported by The Arts Council of England.

With 4’ 33” also being the title of John Cage’s infamous piece of silent music, the compilation is a mix of silence, Morse code, underwater recordings by David Attenborough’s leading sound recordist Chris Watson, a new tunnel song composed by Wibke Hott and a choir made up of tunnel workers and a new track by Pete Wylie and Jeff Young, partly recorded live in an empty section of the Kingsway Tunnel.

Mr Dunn, originally from Glasgow, was lead artist at Fact on ground-breaking community TV project tenantspin and has been making work about Liverpool since moving here in 1994.

He currently lectures at Leeds Metropolitan University. For more information, visit www.alandunn67.co.uk

vickyanderson