About the Film

This sound artist documentary film follows musician Martin Green as he built new soundscapes for Aeons: a Sound Journey for Newcastle, a piece commissioned for the Great Exhibition of the North in 2018. Rather than filming a finished performance, the documentary follows Martin’s process of recording and shaping sound, and captures him working alongside singer Becky Unthank as new material for the piece took shape.

Sound as the Subject

Most of my documentary work is built around people talking, making or performing something in front of a camera. Aeons asked for something slightly different: a film about sound itself, and about the quieter, more exploratory process of building something out of recordings rather than performing a finished piece. Filming Martin meant spending time in the moments before a sound becomes music, listening back, adjusting, and deciding what to keep and what to lose.

A Soundwalk Built Around the River

Aeons was made to be listened to on headphones while walking a specific route along the Tyne, from the castle end of the quayside down to a bend in the river near the end of the walk. Martin recorded much of the piece using a binaural, dummy-head microphone, a technique built to capture sound the way two human ears actually hear it, so that listening back on headphones feels close to standing in the same spot rather than hearing a flat recording of it.

As one bridge gives way to the next, a single musical theme returns three times in different arrangements: first on accordion, then reworked electronically, and finally in a full orchestral setting as walkers reach the last stretch of the route. The piece is explicitly about time and identity tied to place, and it ends deliberately unresolved, with the sense that something is waiting just around the next bend in the river.

Working with Becky Unthank

Singer Becky Unthank’s voice became a central part of Aeons, and filming her session with Martin gave the documentary its clearest sense of the piece coming together. Rather than staging a separate interview, the camera stayed close to the actual work of recording, watching a single voice tested against Martin’s layered soundscapes until the two settled into place together.

A Sound Artist Documentary Film for the Great Exhibition of the North

Aeons was made as part of the Great Exhibition of the North in 2018, a citywide programme celebrating art, design and innovation across Newcastle and Gateshead. Alongside the finished piece, this sound artist documentary film exists to give audiences a way into Martin’s process, showing the patience and craft behind a work that, in performance, lasts only a matter of minutes but took considerably longer to build and record.

Filming Process Rather Than Performance

Wherever possible I like filming artists in the middle of making something, rather than filming them afterwards talking about work that is already finished. Aeons offered exactly that kind of access, right down to hearing Martin talk through why a binaural recording technique mattered to the piece as a whole.

What stays with me from filming Aeons is how much of the finished piece depends on things that never make it into a headline description: the exact angle of a microphone, a single word changed in a lyric, the decision to let a recording run on rather than cut it early. Those small, unglamorous choices are usually what a documentary about process is actually about, and this sound artist documentary film sits alongside a wider run of films I have made about musicians, composers and sound artists working across the North East.