Soft Rains Will Come
Christopher Steenson

Soft Rains Will Come is an artwork by Christopher Steenson, taking the form a spatial sound installation that operates as a live radio broadcast within the gallery space. The installation combines live shortwave radio signals, found recordings of shortwave radio, field recordings, analogue photography, and written research materials to transmit an ‘imaginary landscape’.

Amongst the static and squawks of communication, an unknown voice broadcasts itself to twelve transistor radios. This acousmêtre is an eavesdropper and divinator, outlining a speculative future of the earth, as it transforms under an erratically changing climate.

Like the weather itself, the sound work exists as an entropic system that constructs and recombines itself in endlessly disordered ways. Past and present fragments of sound are perpetually rearranged, to make predictions of an anxious future.

This publication was produced to accompany Soft Rains Will Come, which was presented at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art in Carlow, Ireland, from 26 February to 22 May 2022. ¹

Christopher Steenson is an artist based between the north and south of Ireland. With a background in psychology and the sonic environment, his work uses sound, analogue photography and writing to forge ways of ‘listening to the future’. ²