Esther Metcalfe is a multidisciplinary artist based in Glasgow, working across film, sculpture, sound and installation.
The World Falls Down is an experimental sound installation combining found audio, disjointed voices, and ritualistic loops through a system of 21 cassette players, controlled via Raspberry Pis. Each cassette player contains a 4 second tape loop which repeats endlessly. Using sequences of power manipulation, the tapes cycle and layer, echoing cures, curses, and incantations lost in time. Audio from an NHS relaxation cassette tape and the song ‘Be My Love’ by Mario Lanza is fragmented and looped. The intentioned relaxation benefit of the NHS tape is subverted, and instead creates an unnerving and disrupting anxiety. The interplay of analogue imperfection and digital timing creates a building unease, as voices glitch, decay, and re-emerge like forgotten transmissions from beyond. In this shifting soundscape, the past is neither dead nor dormant, it rewinds, distorts, and speaks again.
