Speed Archer

Class war in the countryside! Class war in Ambridge!

Speed Archer takes a corpus of the BBC radio drama The Archers, every episode between 2009 and 2014, and methodically reduces each show into two audio files. One of silence, one of noise, the dividing line being the dynamic of the voice, split between the volume of speech and the lower volume of the the breaths, hesitations, fumbles, coughs, background environment, pauses and silences between. Presented as a continuous cycle of sixty seconds of the “noise” followed by sixty seconds of the “silence”.

The condensed noise and silence exposes the speech patterns of a master/slave relationship within the english class system. The lord having important, dynamic, dominate and credible voice patterning whilst the serf being hesitant, passive, frivolous, sly or feckless.

Within each episode you hear the sing-song jollity of a position of power versus the monotony of tone of the exploited, followed by awkward passive-aggressive silences of expectation, opposed to slow gasps of resignation.