POGUE IN A HOLE - SUNDAY TIMES APRIL 2006

The musician and artist Jem Finer arrives in the car park of Kings Wood, near the village of Challock in Kent, on a wet Sunday afternoon in late May. Deep inside the forest, on the side of a hill, is a seven metre deep concrete shaft, constructed at Finer’s behest, after he won a commission from the Performing Rights Society for a piece called Score For A Hole In The Ground. It is raining heavily. Finer locks the boot of his estate car and puts on a Kagoul. “Have you got waterproofs?”, he asks, “It’s about an hour’s walk.”

I was lucky enough to be asked to take a seat on the judging panel for last year’s inaugural PRS Foundation New Music Award. Finer, a former member of The Pogues, was already familiar from his Longplayer project, a thousand year piece of music that endlessly rearranges itself via specially developed software in Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse in London’s docklands. Finer’s new proposal included a crudely sketched drawing of water dripping down a shaft, striking pivoted, resonating bowls, and sending notes up into the ether through a giant brass horn. One suggested site was a remote, disused Staffordshire mine-shaft, and there was something attractive about the idea of an abandoned industrial space being adapted in this way. Despite providing little scientific supporting evidence, Finer had thoughtfully sketched little notes emerging from the horn, so we knew the design would work.

We set off through the woods, already soaked. But why were we in Kent? “Well, I liked the idea of the mineshaft, with a big brass horn coming out of it, like a sort of colliery band, and I found some amazing holes.,” agrees Finer. “I looked down an 80 foot deep well in Staffordshire, and the feeling of negative space was incredible, but I leant over and shouted into it and the sound was sucked into the old bricks like acoustic sponges. I panicked at that point and thought it wasn’t going to work.” Finer, who now has the air of a geography teacher who has lost his way on a school trip, gets his bearings before heading deeper into the wood. “Next I looked down a 250 ft lead mine. At the bottom you could see water rippling but again it was the same non-acoustic phenomenon. In the end the decision was made for me. I would have to construct the sound-hole myself.”

For Finer, this sudden change of direction wasn’t an insurmountable disaster. “One of the things I love is when you make plans for something, however sketchy or detailed, and in the process of carrying them out unexpected things occur and the whole thing starts to develop a life of its own.” Finer’s team began construction of a shaft in Kings Wood, Kent, which already houses some site-specific sculptures commissioned by the Stour Valley Arts Organisation, though it has none of the formality of The North Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Finding your way through the forest to the sound-hole is half the fun, the journey creating a mounting sense of excitement. Cresting a hill, the rain subsides momentarily, and we see a steel plate lying amidst the bluebells in a little clearing overlooking a valley. “Warning. Deep Excavations” reads a sign. Deer shadow us in the woods.

We bend down to drag the metal cover off the shaft. “It’s very heavy. Pull it from one corner. If we lift it you can have a look.” As the sheet scrapes the hole's rim, the silo resonates reassuringly. “Hello hello”, shouts one of our little party, as echoes of her own voice bounce back. Stones are and pebbles are dropped experimentally into the exposed corner of the hole, and thunder voluminously as they land. As Finer watched the last of the concrete collars lowered into the shaft, a tremor made him loose his balance and he remembers swaying uneasily at the edge of the seven meter drop, time standing still. Though shaken by the experience, Finer’s also self-aware enough to find the idea of the conceptual artist falling fatally into his own hole darkly comic. “The first new thing,” he explains, “was having to make sure the hole didn’t get to full of water so you get into real stone age plumbing stuff. But what’s changed most is ideas about what the instrumentation would be. In the original proposal it was going to be Tibetan Singing Bowls with water dripping into them, and any movement would modulate the notes, but I just got hold of a book called La Musique De L’eau, by an experimental musical instrument maker called Jaques Dudon, and there’s some brilliant new things in that.”

Beautiful though the site of the sculpture is, even without the horn yet in place, I miss the connotations implicit in the original proposal. I liked the idea of re-appropriating an industrial space, suggesting a curse lifted. I liked the devotional aspects of the water striking the Buddhist bowls, reminded of Larkin’s line, “If I were called in to construct a religion I should make use of water.” But, following Finer’s law of unexpected consequence, the site seems to be constructing its own new and unique narrative, with its own unseen implications.
We walk up the hill a little. “It’s very slippery round here, be careful,” says Finer. “Let’s see how much water is in the pond. Good. That’s a relief. It’s nearly up to the top of the pipe.” We’re looking at a low, clay lined depression, from which a feeder pipe supplies the hole. In Finer’s original proposal, rain was the source of the sound-hole’s water. But, as the record temperatures of the last month have shown, we can no longer rely on rain. Longplayer is eternal. But one of Score For A Hole In The Ground’s key components is no longer a guaranteed commodity. So the team have constructed a dew pond, an artificial reservoir traditionally favoured by farmers of chalky landscapes like those in which the wood is situated. On the way out of King’s Wood, we seen a genuine ancient dew pond, and also to the remains of prehistoric flint mines. Score For A Hole In The Ground suddenly begins to seem at home, as if part of an ongoing process.

Nonetheless, it’s a long journey from The Pogues to Score For A Hole In The Ground, isn’t it? “Not really,” explains Finer. “In the Pogues we took a timeless tradition, Irish folk music, and hopefully reinvigorated it and redefined it but it didn’t sound dated. After four years of programming Longplayer, I found myself consumed by digital technology and my whole life became mediated between one finger on a mouse and a two dimensional screen, and I wanted to get back to a more physical involvement with playing music, to be involved with physical materials and the earth. I’m continually curious about music and sound and modes of composition, and this leads me into ever more expanded ideas of what music is, of what sound is.”

Last month the giant steel horn was brought from a Nottingham foundry and installed in the hole. On the 24th of September, Score For A Hole In The Ground will open to the public. Now it’s time to trek back through the wet woods. “I feel very excited indeed,” says Finer. “This is actually happening. And it’s actually working. It’s such a simple idea. The hole has an innate resonance to it and the plumbing system is working. The whole idea is not just leaking away into the ground.