Selected photos from our 24 hours of Variable 4 Snape Maltings photographs, courtesy of Louis Mustill.

[View with PicLens]

13:19pm, 28 May 2011

17:13pm, 28 May 2011

19:29pm, 28 May 2011

21:38pm, 28 May 2011

22:59pm, 28 May 2011

03:30am, 29 May 2011

03:44am, 29 May 2011

11:53am, 29 May 2011

We’re twelve hours into Variable 4 Snape Maltings and layering up for nighttime under the Suffolk sky. Thanks to everybody who caught the coach to join us this afternoon — after a long period of grey skies, the sun eventually broke through to herald its departure.

Remote viewers can listen to our audio stream, and view a fantastic ongoing timelapse video of the site courtesy of the endlessly skilled Louis Mustill.

Snape Maltings weather forecast for today: something for everyone. The ideal conditions for Variable 4.

Here in Aldeburgh, the first couple of days of setup have been arduous but fun. Thanks to herculean efforts, we’ve now got speaker trenches dug, circuitous cable runs laid, an operational weather station, an ad hoc surround-sound mixing room with iOS remote controls, a networked outhouse via festooned CAT-5, some lightboxed signage and — imminently — a beautifully-printed artists book to mark and document the installation.

[View with PicLens]

To integrate Variable 4 seamlessly into the landscape, we've opted for the route of embedding the speakers into the ground with individual chambers. This has meant some heavy excavation into some very dry ground. Many thanks to Dave, Louis and Tom for some major earth shifting.

The first complete ground-embedded speaker chamber.

Dave and Louis wade through the mire of speaker cabling.

No network access is available in the Dovecote studio. Thanks to some heroics from Faster Than Sound's Tom, however, we're now the proud operators of an airborne CAT5 network.

Our composition space in the Dovecote.

Wiring up the weather station in heavy gales.

More circuitous cabling, here deploying the weather station's data cable across a reed field.

We’re departing early tomorrow morning to spend a week’s residency at Aldeburgh, to install, develop and fine-tune the piece in situ. To assemble the requisite vanload of materials and equipment without losing the remnants of our sanity, we’ve created the longest kit list known to humankind. Behold.

On the estuary banks of the rivers Alde and Ore, the Snape Maltings arts complex — the soon-to-be home for Variable 4 — has a rich heritage. It is made up of a collection of former Victorian malthouses, which were subsequently discovered by composer Benjamin Britten as a suitable site for a creative hub for the south-east. Britten and Peter Pears led the 1960s redevelopment of the site for their fast-growing annual Aldeburgh Festival, featuring a huge auditorium and several rehearsal spaces.

The auditorium was tragically destroyed by a fire on the opening night of the festival, but was rapidly rebuilt and restored to operation the following year. Now owned by the Aldeburgh Music organisation, it is today used year-round for a large number of concerts, residencies and teaching, alongside countless other attractions: cafes, shops, galleries and tearooms, with food that Variable 4 can highly vouch for.

[View with PicLens]

Boat on the River Ore.

The view across the Hepworth Lawn. The installation will be sited here, looking out onto the shimmering reed beds.

A map of Snape Maltings.

The Dovecote studio, where we'll be working from, vaguely resembling a rusty brick acorn.

Inside the Dovecote. As far as we could discern, literally every room at Snape Maltings houses at least one piano.