Towards the insignificant Richard Linklater’s Slacker begins with the end of a journey as the opening titles play across the half-light image of a bus arriving into town at daybreak. A young man alights and we follow his journey further by taxi until the camera is drawn towards another character. As events proceed we begin to wonder after him. This feeling persists even after we realise we have seen the last of him. Each character suffers the same fate – through interlaced paths and points of intersection they enter the story only to leave as they step outside the frame, or the camera drifts away.

All positions are partial In ‘The Minimalist Object and the Photographic Image’ Alex Potts speaks of Robert Smithson’s explicit instruction that in photographing his environmental work ‘the photographer was not to represent it as object or image but to project an encounter with it’. Through a multiplicity of images it seemed possible to ‘undo the framing closures of a single privileged view’.

Your sound position The documentary sound recordist speaks of (your) ‘sound position’ – the spot you take up in a momentary decision, and which determines the sound perspective of your recording. You take your position, you are committed. This is the point of focus, and each sound is understood in relation to this. In turn all other positions are excluded. In Wim Wenders’ Lisbon Story we see the recordist out walking, microphone blimp aloft. He enters a square, chooses his sound position, then moves or operates the boom, sequencing the sound, and our attention – leading the image, which follows the sound.

Energy transfer (slight return) Most of the sound energy of bat calls occurs at frequencies far outside the range that humans can detect. Human hearing peaks at around 20,000Hz, while echolocation inhabits the space up to 200KHz. Sound pulses (quite loud if we could hear them) are bounced off obstacles or prey as the bat gauges distance, shape, and surface by the time taken for the echoes to return. These sounds can be transposed with detectors, manifesting in rapid series of clicks audible to us. Rhythm and rate of repetition as well as frequency help identify and map species. In Ireland, bats are widespread across the island. Known to be active from late spring, as climate changes, bats exhibit atypical hibernation patterns.

Sound system Over some considerable time, through great care and deliberation, yet always attuned to contingency, David Donohoe has developed a timbral ecosystem. The piano; sometimes close, sometimes removed, the sense and sound of pressure on keys, hammers on dampened strings; hand bells and singing bowls; metal struck and sounded. Met at uncertain point(s) by tones generated through FM synthesis these spectrally processed sounds have no edges, no perimeter. Zones merging the domestic with the undefinable. Tone clusters. From this common sound system nine propositions are configured here.

I am standing on a mountain in the vastness of the moment With this music is created a sense of place, of multiple places or rooms. Each track is a different room that we find we have just entered, though we do not know ‘when’ (at what point in its duration) we have arrived. There is no sense – just like being in a room – of a beginning or an end, just that we are now/here.

framework/rupture Perhaps each place is one of Borges’ infinite hexagonal galleries. Within, there is no sense of fixity. The room expands or contracts through natural or artificially introduced reverberation. The logic of a single space is not maintained. Resonances are varied, suspended, or abruptly cut. The point of incidence shifts. This makes us move inside the room like a camera or microphone, attending to one particular detail before panning or zooming to focus on the next.

Your work is an offering With no attempt toward finitude or resolve, these offerings are there for us and then they are not. Although taut and focussed, they allow us to drift. Between each an air shaft, and then we are in another room.

As much about forgetting as remembering In convoking disparate sounds, ideas are brought into proximity, collisions or constellations occur, and uncertain places are evoked. Sometimes, at an intersection of zones within this ecosystem familiar sound memories come to mind – the piano lesson, a melody – and are gone. They are mere speculations.