Architecture as an Instrument: Das Spezial at Kingston Maurward

For our latest Architecture as an Instrument experiment, we found ourselves in a slightly unexpected setting. Kingston Maurward is an agricultural college and working farm just outside Dorchester, but it is also a historic estate with a manor house, public gardens and grounds that are opened up to visitors at weekends. We were lucky enough to be given access to the house and spent the day exploring what its architecture might contribute to the music.

The starting point was similar to our earlier experiment at AUB Drawing Studio, where we were interested in treating architecture less as a backdrop for music and more as an instrument in its own right. This time we took one of our new tracks, ‘Thief’ featuring India Blue, into Kingston Maurward House and played it through the building, recording the pre-delay, reverb and reflections of the space. Rather than trying to recreate the acoustic character of the building afterwards, we wanted to capture what happened naturally when the track encountered the room.

It is a relatively simple idea, but spending time doing it makes you realise how much of what we think of as the sound of a piece of music is actually dependent on where we hear it. A room can push certain frequencies forward, soften others, create a sense of distance or intimacy, and add a layer of movement that isn't contained within the recording itself. The same track played in two different buildings can suddenly feel like a different piece of music, even though nothing about the original recording has changed.

On paper, there isn't an obvious connection between an agricultural college and an independent music collective. But the more we talked to the people working there and understood a little more about what they were trying to do, the more parallels we started to notice. Kingston Maurward is concerned with passing knowledge and practical skills on to the next generation, while also trying to preserve and maintain traditions that are in danger of being lost. It is a working environment, an educational one and a community, but it also has this public-facing side, with people coming to walk through the gardens, meet the animals in their animal farm and spend time in the estate, simply because the place has been kept open for them.

There is a real sense of commitment behind that. The people who work there seem to care about the place not simply as an institution or a business, but as something they have inherited responsibility for and want to continue. That felt quite close to the way we think about Das Spezial and the collective around it. Independent music has always depended on people being willing to share knowledge, make things themselves, create opportunities for one another and keep particular ideas, practices and communities going, often without any guarantee that it will make commercial sense to do so.

The industries are obviously very different, but perhaps that is part of what made the comparison interesting. Both are concerned with practice and with passing things on; with learning from what already exists while finding ways to adapt it; and with creating an environment where other people can become involved. There is also something quite physical about both. You can learn about farming from a book, just as you can listen to a piece of music digitally, but neither quite replaces the experience of actually being there.

That physicality has been something we've been thinking about more generally through the Architecture as an Instrument experiments. So much of the way we encounter music now happens outside the spaces in which it was made. A track can travel instantly from a studio to someone's headphones on the other side of the world, which is obviously an incredible thing, but it also means that the physical circumstances of listening can become almost invisible. At the same time, many of the places where people used to encounter music collectively are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, with independent venues and other cultural spaces disappearing.

A room isn't simply somewhere you put speakers. Its proportions, materials and surfaces become part of what you hear, and when you experience music in a particular place those qualities can become inseparable from your memory of the track. This is something that is easy to overlook when a piece of music is reduced to a file that can be played identically almost anywhere.

Kingston Maurward gave us an opportunity to make that relationship tangible again. We could hear the building responding to the music, but we were also interested in the fact that the building has its own identity and history, and that both of those things affect the way the experiment feels. The house isn't an empty acoustic chamber; it is part of a much larger working place, surrounded by gardens, farmland, students, staff, visitors and, inevitably, a fairly vocal population of goats and pigs.The animals ended up becoming part of the film too, through a series of what we would describe as interviews, although we are not sure they would necessarily agree with that description.

This is probably where the project stopped being a straightforward acoustic experiment and became something more interesting to us: an attempt to spend time in a place, understand a little about what happens there and see what connections might emerge between it and the things we are doing ourselves. The resulting film moves between the music, the architecture, the people who work at Kingston Maurward and some of its less conventional residents, rather than trying to separate those things into different stories.

In the end, the experiment was as much about listening to the place as it was about listening to the music. We went there intending to use the architecture as an instrument, but the process also made us think more about the communities and practices that give a place its character, and about the importance of keeping physical spaces available for people to make, learn, listen and gather.

The full film documents the experiment at Kingston Maurward, including the acoustic recordings, conversations and a few unexpected contributions from the farm.

‘Thief’ featuring India Blue is available to stream and download now from major platforms.