REVIEW Jun 2025 ‘From the River’s Mouth’ Hayley Suviste’s acoustic installation at SFTOC

Jo Manby

Sound artist, composer and field recordist, Hayley Suviste, currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at the University of Manchester’s NOVARS Research Centre, was recently commissioned to make new work as Artist in Residence at the Acoustics Laboratories, University of Salford. A 45-minute-long immersive sound installation, ‘From the River’s Mouth’ was the result of Suviste’s residency at the Acoustics Labs, in a partnership with the University of Salford Art Collection and From The Other, the organisation behind Sounds From The Other City (SFTOC) festival. Showcased in the Laboratories on Sunday 4 May 2025 as part of SFTOC, and created from audio visual recordings of various types, the work was processed and composed within the Laboratory’s specialised spaces, and presented to the public across three unique acoustic rooms. the Fourdrinier editor Jo Manby went along to the event and reviews her experience of it here.

There will be a further presentation of ‘From the River’s Mouth’ later this year. A version of the final work will be acquired by the University of Salford Art Collection.

Hayley Suviste’s ‘From the River’s Mouth’ is an immersive three stage audio installation that takes its audience on a journey from a womblike, amniotic place, to the stage in life of inhabiting a body in a real-world environment, and finally to a kind of philosophical space that is like occupying the mind’s eye and looking out onto a rain-soaked world.

For Suviste, being Artist in Residence at the University of Salford Acoustic Laboratories was a significant turning point in her career. She had first volunteered at Sounds From The Other City a decade ago and regularly attends the festival, making the premiering of the commission at the 20th anniversary of the festival particularly special; additionally, it was the first time she had explored audio-visual and installation work together. The brief, she recalls, was broad and non-prescriptive meaning that she was free to experiment and to work intuitively in new ways.

From the submerged world of a watery interior, In the Shallows, contained within an anechoic chamber; to the sensory life of a body near water, At the River’s Edge, inside a listening room fitted with multiple speakers, five beanbags, a sofa and two chairs; to the mind adrift and daydreaming in the abstraction of a river, Outflow, situated in the darkened, sonorous environment of a reverberation room. In this final presentation, an illuminated crucible of water, light and sound that cast a rippling pattern onto the floor in the shape of a fanlight, such as you would see on a rainy night above a door on a Georgian street.

On the day, my journey to experience the work involves signing up for Sounds From The Other City. Walking along Chapel Street and the Crescent towards campus I can already hear the festival DJs on The Green. The River Irwell on my right cuts through the valley deep below the level of the road, bounded by the densely wooded fringe of The Meadow. The hawthorn is decked out in its May blossom; hazel, ash, birch, willow, all thick with green and white spring flowers. A green metal fence divides this spring paradise, shot through with birdsong, the river at the bottom dark and smooth in places, ruffled with fragments of the sky in others by the wind and the ebb and flow of currents.

Waiting my turn to be taken into the Acoustics Lab, I stand for a while on The Green in front of Salford Museum & Art Gallery, transformed like most of the adjacent buildings into a music venue. I soak up the joyful atmosphere under an oak tree tied with pastel rainbow ribbons. Outside the Maxwell Building, an inflatable tube man dances on and off the beat of the DJ’s music, a languid jerky rising and falling of ineffable elegance.

With the dipping of the branches of the oak tree, I realize that the breeze that choreographs the blue and red air dancer and courses through the trees on the Green is in tune with the human activities that are going on here on this little patch of the surface of the earth. It means Suviste’s claim that her work considers ‘the river not as a mere body of water, but as a living entity, constantly evolving and shaping the world around it’ is on point. The reverberating bass, the crowds milling around drinking and chatting, are nothing new to the trees, the wind and the nearby river. You can almost feel their sentience.

Gathering at the meeting point, in groups of ten people we are led off into campus towards the Acoustics Lab, past seminar rooms and offices, down a dim blue-lit corridor, into a basement area for the first part of the experience: In the Shallows, inside the anechoic chamber. Suviste later explained to me that each of the rooms, with its own individual acoustic environment, bears a different relationship to the river. The titles for the three stages emerged gradually as the work was created. In the Shallows is exclusively composed of underwater recordings made using hydrophones submerged in the River Irwell, and presented via a 12-channel speaker array.

An anechoic chamber, we are told before entering, is completely soundless to begin with, to the point that if there is no other noise being presented, you can hear your own blood circulating. We immediately pick up on the intimacy of the experience. Invited to move and walk around the room to take advantage of the different sounds emanating from the different speakers, we tread carefully – the whole room is lined with foam, and under our feet is a plastic netting suspended over foam shapes. It is womb-like, amniotic – it is, after a few minutes, very relaxing – a subaquatic darkened place full of delicate snapping and hissing.

We are only in the anechoic chamber for four minutes. It seems longer. Next is At the River’s Edge. We walk into a different room, make ourselves comfortable among the various informally arranged seating. There is a mixture of natural, unprocessed field recordings and composed music accompanying video footage of the riverbanks. I am told later this installation uses a 112-channel Wave Field Synthesis rig and eight additional spatialised channels. It’s good to know that a version of the work, ‘From the River’s Mouth’, will be acquired by the University of Salford Art Collection, because this means that such challenging and testing technical configurations can be appreciated within an academic as well as an artistic context.

We watch footage of the river simultaneously reflecting the white and blue of the sky and revealing the golden brown-toned silt of its bed, intermittently invaded by tiny bubbles of pollution. The accompanying soundtrack is jewelled and spangling, there are little implosions of bells and xylophones. Painterly, considered images of litter, a shopping trolley, as well as gliding waterbirds, and a shrunken orange balloon caught on a branch, slowly cross the split screens, the sound of rippling water, the calls of geese. Someone sings a shanty or a folk song. There is the distant rush of wind.

Guided into the third presentation inside the reverberation room, for Outflow, the heavy door shuts with a shudder. We sit on rows of chairs underneath a ceiling banked up with acoustic reflectors, all eyes focused on an illuminated bowl of water upon a dais at the front of the darkened space. An audible sound appears to disturb the water. I find out later that technically, this installation employs 7-channel audio paired with cymatic water projections, a method of using frequencies to vibrate water and create real time shifting visual patterns, which are influenced by the natural reverberation of the room itself. I have the impression again, sitting watching and listening, of the sights and sounds of the city tied in with the fabric of nature.

Concentric ripples shimmer on the floor in this four-section fan shape. There are looping resonant sounds and whirling shapes, a dark star radiating gleaming light, the sound of a wind getting up and a threatening storm. Then in full flood, as if it is now raining, thick, heavy, fabled Manchester and Salford rain, I hear the rumble of thunder, a dog barks and a woman calls her kids in. The reflected light is now like rain running down a window looking out on a grey city scene. It’s emotive, like a homecoming, an evensong. Haunting, lyrical. There are wind instruments and the sound of water birds and a flowing river. Rippling light marbling the floor like reflections on the underside of a bridge over water. Droplets of sound make distinct patterns then there is a hush and all the background noise and light fades away.

At the end of it I feel I have been taken on a journey, and it’s emotional. I asked Suviste whether her upbringing had been urban or rural, and if it had been beside water? She explained that she is originally from Birmingham, moving to Manchester around a decade ago. She used to seek out Birmingham’s watery places, both walking along the city’s canals or by the Sutton Park lakes not far from where she lived. I’m keen to hear more about the way Suviste creates a balance between the human and the natural world. What’s her ideal version of this integration in art terms, and more widely?

She speaks of presence and relationship rather than separation and control. She is not concerned with blanking herself out of a scene to achieve some kind of purity of source material. In her work, she says, she is always an integrated part of the environment as opposed to a silent observer. For example, an animal might respond to her as she engages with the space, or a person might greet her, or her reflection might appear over the water in her video footage. All these signs of assimilation are embraced as marking the continual dialogue between herself and the natural world around her.

In terms of the politics of her work, I wondered if Suviste identifies as an eco-artist or in some way an activist, or socially engaged. How far does she intend politics to enter her work or be extrapolated from it? She tells me that her intention is to embed awareness and connection to our environment in the experiences she creates, advocating our reflections on care, responsibility and justice. The expediency of the climate crisis makes her work immediately political, but so does the seemingly unstoppable urban development of the Manchester and Salford landscape.

Some of Suviste’s previous projects, Edgeland and Way Down to Pomona, like ‘From the River’s Mouth’, focused on urban green and blue spaces, she explains, performing the dual role of celebrating the inherent value of these natural oases while performing protest and advocacy that calls for a sense of urgency and connection, strengthening the desire in people to care and protect wild and rewilded land.

I asked Suviste how difficult it was to create the audio, from recording, mixing to streaming and presenting it in the Acoustics Lab. She explained that the process of gathering recordings wasn’t a problem. She described the informality of walking the length of the Irwell from Peel Park to Kersal Wetlands and responding to the sounds and sights along the way, equipped with field recording instruments including hydrophones to record underwater and a camera. There was a distinct contrast between the density and murkiness of the subaqueous soundscape close to the urban conurbation and the more vibrant, clean cut biodiverse version that she found in the rewilded areas further away from the city.

This process was intuitive and meditative, a slow unfolding of being in the environment with all the serendipity and presence that entails. The technicalities came later with working on the material in the Lab. Suviste experimented in the different acoustic spaces with playing back her recordings, testing out various forms of reverberation, absorption and resonance, and also different speaker set ups. During this period of playback and testing, synthesisers and clarinet among other sound design elements were layered in and although this required a lot of logistical working out and ‘critical listening’, it retained the unconfined exploratory feel of the original riverside recordings stage. Suviste composed the pieces in the rooms, and this was one of the huge advantages of the residency.

It was the first time she had been able to compose in purpose-built acoustic spaces, inviting a whole new way of working, for example the major leap of finding out how to use the Wave Field Synthesis Rig and accompanying software, a spatial audio format that was brand new to Suviste. Fundamentally, the work evolved through a process of listening and response both to the audio-visual material she had collected and the properties of the spaces she was able to experiment in and create this incredible series of acoustic installations.

I was interested to understand to what extent Suviste uses musical instruments/synthesisers as opposed to processing sounds, cadences and chords from ‘real life’ recordings. How she as the composer and we as the audience are able to distinguish between the two. She tells me that while she is particularly attracted by natural rhythms and textures experienced in real environments, and these usually form the essential structure of the work.

They anchor it both situationally and in terms of narrative flow, but from there, she often works into the recordings by processing or layering them in ways that emphasise particular textures or take the narrative in a certain direction, thus burring any division between acoustic and electronic. However, there are times when field recordings are left to stand alone, using instrumental or synthesised sound to sit alongside, evoking a conversational effect between found and composed sound.

To illustrate this, she cites In the Shallows, the anechoic chamber piece, which opens with raw underwater recordings which Suviste then manipulates by layering but without adding any effects. Later on in the piece, a synthesised drone is gradually introduced. She played this back into the river water using a submerged waterproof speaker and made re-recordings using hydrophones. This meant the sounds of the drone and the river were fused within the same recording. It also meant – as was pointed out to our group when we came out of the anechoic chamber – that this was probably the first time the subaquatic animals had been exposed to alien musical sounds from the world above the water surface.

For At the River’s Edge (the second room), Suviste maintained the natural sounds of her field recordings and played them back through the wave field synthesis rig of 120 speakers suspended from the ceiling of the room. Working with the acoustic qualities of the space, this meant that the sounds could orchestrate themselves spatially throughout the room in a lifelike way. Additions of instrumental music were broadcast via different multi-channel speakers round the centre of the room, allowing each type of sound layer to coexist.

In Outflow, the final room, these distinctions were more blurred. Field recordings were played in short snippets interwoven with synthesised material, and then both acquired further ambiguity through the room’s natural reverberation. It was hard to tell as an audience member where the sounds were coming from, or how it was put together. There was a dreamlike feeling of drifting and of stillness amidst flux and change.

Suviste cites among her artistic influences Pauline Oliveros, known for her concept of Deep Listening; Jana Winderen and her incredible field recordings; Annea Lockwood, who explores the sonic life of waterways; and KMRU and Slowfoam who both create richly textured sound worlds by mixing field recordings with composed music. She also notes her inspiring, supportive network of fellow Manchester-based artists, who often share equipment and ideas as well as collaborative working practices, including Guillaume Dujat, Lili-Holland Fricke, Ryan Woods, Kelly Jayne Jones, Vicky Clarke, Lizzie King, Fiona Brehony and Aisling Davis.

Suviste also worked closely with the Acoustics Lab staff throughout the residency, helped enormously by their expertise regarding the acoustic properties of the various spaces. In particular she recalls Danny Wong-McSweeney’s enthusiasm and generosity, for example in assisting with cymatics, used in the third installation, gathering together all the equipment necessary for running sound through a shaker to vibrate the water, and collaborating on troubleshooting how to make it happen in the space.

The fact that this work is going to be acquired by the UoS Art Collection feels really important to Suviste. Prior to this residency and commission, she would not have considered her work to have a place in a traditional art context. Having it formally recognised and acquired is ‘both unexpected and affirming’. It’s also really good news for visitors to the collection, who will be able to access and learn about a significant work of acoustic art long into the foreseeable future: a collection that is situated minutes away from the River Irwell itself, that animate, flowing body of water that winds in and out of urban Manchester and Salford and on into the increasingly green spaces of the surrounding countryside.

From the River's Mouth was commissioned by the University of Salford Art Collection and Acoustics Laboratories, in partnership with Sounds From The Other City Festival 2025.

University of Salford Art Collection share the Fourdrinier’s passion for shining a light on contemporary art in the North and fostering new writing talent, and have paid for this review.

The views expressed in this review are solely those of the author.