press + interviews

Radio

Print + online

Interview in Through Sounds on sound, art and the Anthropocene, October 2023

Interview in The Times on music and ecological crisis, February 2022

Interview with Fifteen Questions, August 2021

Interview with The Wire about Sing the Gloaming, May 2020

Interview with Clot Magazine about Emergent Landscapes, December 2016

Interview with Pitchfork about field recording, November 2015

Interview with The Herald about Concrete Antenna, September 2015

Interview with Cheryl Tipp from The British Library about Surface Tension, August 2015 (part 1)

Interview with Cheryl Tipp from The British Library about Surface Tension, August 2015 (part 2)

Interview with The Quietus about Water of Life, December 2013

Interview with The Herald about Water of Life, November 2013

Interview with The Liminal (archived on Mountain *7), October 2012

Press clippings

“One of the UK’s most innovative composers” – Electronic Sound

“The [Lea Valley] landscape is described with great skill on a new album by the imaginative Lancastrian artist Rob St John. “Surface Tension” documents the course of the River Lea, and makes aesthetic and cultural capital out of both its context – decaying, gentrified, sometimes surprisingly bucolic – and its toxicity. According to St John’s notes, his field recording adventures extended to using “binaural microphones, underwater hydrophones and contact mics.” He also constructed tape loops of these recordings, soaked them in tubs of the vile river water for a month, then replayed them as they fell apart, creating an effect similar to that inadvertently engineered by William Basinski on his “Disintegration Loops”. St John’s music is as interesting as the process which underpins it. It ebbs through passages of chamber piano and cello (reminiscent of post-classical ensemble, Rachel’s), analog kosmische and, at 18 minutes, eerily euphoric, Boards Of Canada-style techno” – John Mulvey, UNCUT

“A man playing the calls of Maltese birds bouncing off an underwater telecommunications cable? Rob St John and Tom Western sound like new wayward Aphex Twins…” – Jude Rogers, The Guardian

“We tend to think of the underearth as a silent space, but of course it is rife with sounds both live and archived. Soundmarks lets us hear what happens when we lay our ears to a landscape; the voices and utterances that surface into the skull. It is itself a conversation between two human makers, St John and Ferraby, but its other authors are air, soil, rock, water and time. Together they have all made a fathoming – a sounding-out – of one place that is also many places.” – Robert Macfarlane

“In Soundmarks, Ferraby and St John have become shape-shifters, sound-sifters and time-drifters. In smudging the boundaries between visual art, sound art, archaeology and creative writing, they also somehow unsettle the identities of the things they discover and create: the paintings seem to have soil clinging to them, the sounds have physical presence in the world, the words they use are as precise and particular as tools, and the earth below our feet is revealed in its storied, supple stratigraphy.” – Caitlin DeSilvey

“The half/life sound installation is a special and unique part of the world of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum. It is unlike anything else ever staged within our special exhibitions, and we are thrilled to be hosting it. Rose Ferraby and Rob St John have created a piece of work that transports our visitors back, over 4,000 years, to a world very different to our own. Through the power of half/life, visitors feel deeply connected to the fascinating story of Seahenge, and the wonders of how ancient communities perceived their landscape, the natural world and the many mysteries of the cosmos. half/life is that rare thing: a contemporary work that channels the power of the deep past.” – Neil Wilkin, The British Museum