After the End of the World
Sound installation and performance at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, 2025
“It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?” June Tyson chants, opening onto Sun Ra’s 1973 jazz masterpiece, Space is the Place. June’s line proclaims a radical ideal: another, alternate world might not only be possible, but may already be here. After The End of The World: ActⅠLIVE, is a sound performance presented for the first time at hcmf //2025. Inspired by Space is the Place, the live performance takes endings as a starting point for flourishing imagination, possibility and openings. Intended as an ongoing sonic reflection on the current state of things in the world, with climate catastrophe, rising division and conflict in our midst, the piece invites another question to ponder: how does it feel to live at the end of the world? Beginning with the sound of a conk shell recorded in St Lucia, where sea level rises and increasingly unpredictable weather trends signal a visceral end of world reality for people living on the shores, the installation seeks to spotlight the voices and sounds of those living on the edge, of the world and extinction, and the ways we can collectively rebuild from the margins. After The End of The World: ActⅠ LIVE intends to be a sonic alarm to locate and revive hope and warmth within the ashes.
MUVA // sound installation at Ultima Contemporary Music Festival, Oslo
In the opening of his 2003 book, ‘In the Break, The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition’ Fred Moten states: “The history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist.” The undoing of the single being, the flat entity, is a necessary political and social task according to Moten, one in which Black communities are continually engaged. Sound and the sonic sphere is one way in which these communities battle for humanity, a form of regenerative subjectivity that Moten describes as the “magic of objects”.
MUVA // is an exploratory performance talk and sound installation that explores these themes through the radical intersection of sonic technology, Black emancipatory politics and the natural world. Working with found sounds, experimental electronics and recorded voices, MUVA // began life in 2024 as an ecological sound art project as part of the Sustainable Composition and Creative Sound Practices programme. The project seeks to explore earth’s hidden and endangered sounds, in order to further understanding of our world and deepen human connection. The MUVA // sound installation, presented at the 2025 Ultima Contemporary Music Festival uses sonic examples to reflect on the ways in which drawing sounds from the natural world can form part of a liberatory consciousness, centring the earth as a place of aural possibilities, magic and hope.
Climate Justice in Action Podcast Series
Commissioned by Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership, the Climate Justice in Action podcast series features Ruth Nortey who speaks to different climate activists and those working in the sector to understand how as we move towards a greener future, we can make sure that it's a fairer future. As a Black Disabled woman, Ruth is particularly interested in understanding how Disabled people and people from global majority communities are being included in actions to reduce the impact of climate change.
The podcast was written by Ruth Nortey. Production by Natalie Hyacinth and Ruth Nortey, with original sound composition by Natalie Hyacinth. The series is part of a creative commission for Bristol Climate & Nature Partnership as part of their National Lottery funded Community Climate and Nature Action Project.
Podcast link: Climate Justice in Action Podcast
Landmarks: Walking the Water
This audio piece is a sound collaboration between sonic artist Natalie Hyacinth and artist Omikemi created for Landmarks, a new outdoor performance ritual created by Omikemi. Landmarks draws on personal experiences of familial estrangement and other forms of disrupted belonging, this immersive ritual performance uses poetry, sound, and movement to take us on an intimate exploration of our outer and inner landscapes. A written excerpt of Landmarks is available below and as part of the Onyx Publication, which has its launch at Autograph on Tuesday 26 July 2022, 18:30-20:00.
OUTWORK
Featuring fascinating ‘herstories’, this 1.5 hour podcast reflects on the working lives of women employed at Kenrick & Jefferson printers in West Bromwich, before it closed in 1993. Artist Sophie Huckfield speaks to local women about their contribution to the printworks, alongside family members who have fond memories of their mothers, grandmothers, aunties, cousins and friends who worked there. As well as exploring the roles and duties these women carried out, this podcast seeks to explore the wider topic of how women can make space to debate what work is and could be.
Interviews and Direction by Sophie Huckfield. Produced by sound artist Dr Natalie Hyacinth and narrated by Wolverhampton City Poet Laureate (2020-2022) Emma Purshouse.
WAVES AMP (Art Music Pressure)
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Echoes of Home
A sonic piece on memories of home, belonging and displacement. Exhibited at the W3 gallery, London.
'Echoes (of) Home' is a four minute sound piece comprised of four voices. Each voice symbolises a unique journey to Ealing. Oral histories of migration, life and love are mixed amidst original composition and experimental sounds produced with an MPC and a sonic echo machine.
The theme of echo is inspired by the definition as follows: 'A true echo is a single reflection of the sound source'.
'Echoes (of) Home' intends to rethink how echoes can be used to represent our multiple places of origin and identities.
We Will Rest is an ongoing sound art piece collectively made and produced by We Will Rest, an international Black and Brown female sound art collective consisting of Natalie Hyacinth, Marlo De Lara and Shanti Suki. Formed from the larger Sonic CyberFeminisms collective that all three are a part of, We Will Rest focuses on rest as reparatory justice for Black and Brown women, with art and sound creation being the medium to speak truth to power. We Will Rest were invited to be a part of arts organisation Action Hero’s, You Can Be My Wingman residency in Devon, UK in February 2022. The We Will Rest sound piece was launched in the summer of 2023 at the Muckenthaler Cultural Centre, California, US.
Beating the Bounds Podcast
This is a podcast made by Natalie Hyacinth and Claire Dwyer of the AHRC funded Making Suburban Faith team who took part in the Beating the Bounds walk on May Bank Holiday Monday 2015.
Beating the Bounds is an ancient tradition, carried out once a year when the parish priest, churchwardens and congregation would walk around the formal boundary of the parish. They would mark the boundary stones of the parish, sometimes by ‘bumping’ the boys of the parish on the stones. The walk served a practical purpose to determine the true extent of the parish, ensuring the extent of those required to contribute to the church, or who might require its services, such as burial. The young boys were supposed to ensure that this knowledge of the parish boundaries was passed on through oral tradition.
In 2015, as part of the AHRC’s Connected Communities Festival we took part in the Carnival, holding a stall to share our research project ‘Making Suburban Faith’ with the public and inviting them to share their own stories of religious and secular walks in Hanwell. We decided to join the Beating the Bounds walk to learn more about this ‘reinvented’ tradition and what it means to those who take part. In this short podcast we share conversations with some of those involved in re-establishing the walk, hearing about how the special boundary stones song was composed and how new boundary stones have been unearthed each year, as well as talking to some of those who have chosen to join the walk.
Migrant Lives in Pandemic Times
The Covid-19 pandemic has left no life untouched. Throughout the world, we have experienced a collective trauma caused by the isolation and uncertainty resulting from Covid-19 restrictions. Migrants, however, face unique challenges – many struggle with restrictions on their mobility, lack of clear immigration status, and the insecurity of living between worlds.
Migrant Lives in Pandemic Times is a digital storytelling project produced by CERC Migration and Migration Matters. Recorded during the summer of 2021, the project presents both personal testimony and expert analysis to explore how the everyday realities of 12 migrants from across the globe have changed during the pandemic.
From a Chilean pandemic home-school tutor in Oakland, California, to a Senegalese street seller in Bilbao, Spain, our stories give voice to those missing in media and public debate with the aim to build solidarity and inform policy across borders.
While the stories share the lived realities of individuals, they also reveal insights into universal conditions and challenges in terms of work, mental health, and the importance of communities. They celebrate resilience, while also critically analyzing the larger structural and policy issues at play.
Each migrant story includes an individual portrait and an accompanying video statement and policy brief produced by an international migration scholar to provide additional context and suggestions for how conditions could be improved. From start to finish, the migrants featured in the project have taken an active role in the production of their stories.
Sonic AfroFuturism ~ In Prose and Sound
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Sonic Earth
An ongoing sonic art project commissioned by the Brigstowe Institute.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.