Ep30 Volcanic treachery & narrowboat adventures - Hannah Smith

Luke 00:00:07  Welcome to another episode of the Pod podcast. My guest today is Hannah Smith. So can you tell me about yourself?

Hannah 00:00:14  I work in a bookshop. Yeah, I'm a bookseller and I'm also an artist, printmaker, linocut, printmaker. So I have those sort of two paper based skills that I love to do. I make bold graphic liner cuts about folklore and nature and animals and sort of things like that. And the occult. So very dark, gothic, lots of skulls and animals and naked women.

Luke 00:00:38  Cool. So you're into folklore?

Hannah 00:00:41  Yeah. How we tell stories to explain things and make sense of the world around us had a focus on paganism and the cycles of nature, living in nature and witches and. And the Dartmoor folk tales and things like that. Ghosts and all those sort of legends that's around this area especially. But yeah, I think anywhere really all around the world has interesting stories.

Luke 00:01:01  So I'm going to play your piece of music. It's completely improvised, and I'd like you to tell me what it makes you think of.

Luke 00:01:08  So that can be anything that comes into your mind.

Hannah 00:02:23  Feels like ominous about it. I don't know if it's because I walked through the woods to get here, but instantly felt like there was a presence in the woods or something that's stalking you as you're walking along. And maybe it's dark or it's almost dark. There's like a threat there. And then towards the end, the threat went away, or you outran it, or you came out the other side of the woods and the sun was out, and it was all okay after all.

Luke 00:02:44  There's definitely that uncertainty, isn't it? What's happening in the forest? What is it.

Hannah 00:02:49  Like being watched? I always feel like I'm being watched in the forest. They do say that the trees talk to each other through the Mycological systems. Maybe there's a bit of being watched by the forest here.

Luke 00:03:02  I'd like you to tell me a story of some kind, and then I'm going to improvise a soundtrack to the story.

Hannah 00:03:06  So when I was about 21, I moved from Australia to this island country called Vanuatu in the Pacific.

Hannah 00:03:14  It's a Pacific archipelago of about 100 islands or so, all spread so through and around Papua New Guinea. I ran a resort there, which I was, like, deeply underqualified to do. It's like a small resort on one of these islands. It was a really strange place to live. It was like picture postcard Paradise, white sandy beaches and blue seas and palm trees and stuff growing everywhere and amazingly beautiful. But then also everything so alive there. All the plants are taking over each other and all the animals are big and the sea life threatening. And there's all this sort of tension between this beauty and this sort of danger all the time. That was sort of really summed up in this trip I did to one of the islands called Tanna, which has an active volcano on it. It's been active for hundreds of years. It's never not been spouting out lava and rumbling around and doing this thing. The island has become like a moonscape wasteland of ash and volcanic ground, organic soil, and there's just gray, amazing space.

Hannah 00:04:09  So you go there in a boat, and then there's a little dark and a little hotel, and you stay in the hotel and they take you out. There's tour guides in really old, beaten up full drives at dusk, because it's the best time to see this volcanic display as it comes up against the sky, the light going down behind it. And it's an amazing thing to do, but it's all really like unregulated. You just get in this car with this guy and he takes you out there, drives you across a waterfall, across this massive gray wasteland, and it's really weird. And then you get there and all the tour guides go. Off you go. Then you climb the volcano. We're going to have a cigarette break, so we all go up the side of it. There's about ten of us. They start climbing up and the sun's going down, and then you get to the top and you realize that you are just standing at the edge of a volcano. And this is really weird experience.

Hannah 00:04:56  There's so much danger here, this amazing energy, this power coming out of the ground. Suddenly there's all this action and I turn around and everyone's screaming. And one of the women had been taking a photograph on the edge, on the very edge of the volcano, and she dropped her camera, and she went to get it, and she slipped and started to fall in, and someone else had to grab her by the ankles and pull her out of this volcano. I remember all the tour guides being like, just incredulous that that would have happened, that we were so stupid. This is like common sense, isn't it? Not to stand on the edge of a volcano. It would have been all for a camera as well, which is a really sad reason to die.

Luke 00:05:31  So you've got the idyllic section and then the barrenness and then this sense of danger, but also awe at the same time, and then the near-miss.

Hannah 00:08:14  It was great. I really got the feeling at the beginning of something beyond delicious and happy and lovely and so full, and then moved into something a bit smoother and bigger, and then danger at the end.

Luke 00:08:23  I considered like fourths to be idyllic, but Brian was, like.

Hannah 00:08:29  I said, it smooths out somehow.

Luke 00:08:36  Did you get the sense of the volcano?

Hannah 00:08:37  Yeah, it was like the sort of energy that you could feel, the idea of lava coming up or something. Pops of.

Luke 00:08:43  Sound. I was going to go for this, like, low, earthy tone and then the sense of.

Hannah 00:08:46  The moment of danger.

Luke 00:08:48  I was imagining when something happens and your perception of time slowed down a bit. You think when you mention the moonscape, I was literally imagining like a moonscape. Yeah.

Hannah 00:08:57  That's a big emptiness. And I think that there was a feeling in that transition from the beginning, from that aliveness to that emptiness. I really felt something. It's got bigger.

Luke 00:09:05  If I'm playing this. I can imagine dense things or forest or trees together, you know? And as we shift from the landscape of sort of dense jungle to something much more open, you can literally do it on the piano and you get that sense.

Hannah 00:09:40  It's creating that space in really literal way.

Luke 00:09:42  And also in time as well, playing less. Do you have another story you could tell.

Hannah 00:09:56  For a while? When I lived in London, I lived on the canal and narrowboat for a couple of years. It was really old, beautiful, proper barge, no narrow barge from the 70s or older. Beautiful old thing. And there used to be this party that would happen with all the boaters. They'd go up river on the last bank holiday of the summer, when you go about to Essex and there's like an estuary area there, all the canals join up and everyone goes down there for 50 boats and you join all the boats together with ropes, and you had this massive three day party with music and food, and everyone climbs on each other's boats, and it's a sort of great regatta. Lots of pirates and really interesting people will trek up there, and it takes about a day out of London. So my partner and I, we set out a bit later than we meant to.

Hannah 00:10:40  So the sun was going down a bit and we're getting out of London was going along quite slowly, and on one side there's just fields. The other side, it's sort of like industry. So no one lives around. It's very empty. It's all going okay. And then suddenly the engine just stops working and we start drifting to know what's going on. My boyfriend goes to see what's happening in the engine room. And I don't know if you've ever seen Battleship Potemkin. It was like that, but like a really small version where the water is coming in, spouting out random places out in the middle of the floor, just pouring out and trying to stop it turned everything off. And then we're just drifting properly and there's nothing and there's no sound and we don't know how to fix it. It's 100 year old engine in the middle of nowhere, no one around. All the lights are gone. And there was a moment of fear in that, in the uncertainty. And then we got the barge pole out from the side and ended up steering ourselves in the dark.

Hannah 00:11:32  And it's just dead quiet, and there's nothing around. And we're out of London and we're just going along. And it was like just one of the most peaceful moments I've ever had on the boat all of a sudden, just with that uncertainty, but beauty and nothing and quiet. It was actually a lovely. In the end, we made it to the party, which is the most important thing.

Luke 00:11:52  So I'm going to go for having a good time and cruising along. And then there's this sort of silence and then this sense of unease flooding, and there's stuff's happening, and then that kind of turns into a sense of calm or acceptance. Maybe once you find the poll and then you make it to the party anyway. Yeah.

Hannah 00:14:20  I loved at the beginning. It wasn't just the sound of the engine, but it was also the feeling of moving, of traveling with the higher notes coming in and making it feel like that lovely feeling of going somewhere and moving and traveling around.

Luke 00:14:31  I tried to keep the consistency of that rhythm, but playing some kind of harmony at the top and then really messing with the rhythm when it starts going wrong and playing with your rhythmic expectation like.

Luke 00:14:43  And then once you've got over the initial panic of this thing going wrong and realized that you couldn't fix it there and then went for a more jazzy kind of approach, it's going to.

Hannah 00:14:52  Go with the flow, literally.

Luke 00:14:59  So what did you get out of this podcast?

Hannah 00:15:01  I think it was interesting how stories have a rhythm to them. Arise on a fall. The way you tell a story has a rhythm to it, has a flow, has highs and lows. And you think it has a beginning, a middle and an end. But actually there's like there's long and short parts, there's tension and there's release. It has a musicality to it. It's the highs of things and the emotion and the space that places are given and the tension.

Luke 00:15:21  And then I tried to reflect that in the music.

Hannah 00:15:23  Yeah, exactly. I think it's a really interesting relationship between the two actually. And you look at it that way.

Luke 00:15:29  Thanks very much for being on the podcast.

Hannah 00:15:30  Thank you. It was really fun.

Luke 00:15:32  Join us next week for another episode of Improv Pod. Thanks for listening.