Electric Echoes at Stockport Air Raid Shelters

A river, abused and neglected, speaks back.

Sucked into tunnels, flushed back out at high temperatures, banks encased in concrete – the River Goyt has suffered for Stockport’s growth. Fundamental to the area’s industrial development, it later supplied the former Stockport Power Station through an underground network of tunnels, drawing water to cool the machinery that generated electricity feeding homes and industry. Power and prosperity arrived – and the river paid.

Electric Echoes, an interactive sound installation and sound walk by sound artist Maya Chowdhry, invites us to listen with her as the river raises its voice. Through a sonic excavation of the underground remains of the power station and the life of the river, Chowdhry draws on ideas of “decolonial cleaning” – practices of care, repair and re-attunement – as a way of listening to the echoes of the power station and the voices of the river, including the lives it has sustained through eons.

This sonic argument unfolds across two sites. Beneath the town, within the underground spaces of the Stockport Air Raid Shelters, Currents from the Power Station channels the electric pulse of the former power station. Featuring six touch-activated copper trumpets, their stems shaped to represent the network of tunnels, the sound sculpture invites visitors to activate the industrial pipes and uncover chapters in the turbulent relationship between the power station and the River Goyt. The currents form a score of an industrial past that has never properly been “cleaned up”, still resonating through the course of the river and the hidden underground tunnels that fed the station.

Above ground, The River Speaks Back is a SoundWalk created in collaboration with local communities Culture Bridge and the Hong Kong Fellowship. Using your mobile phone and the Echoes app, listeners follow the flow of the river through Stockport’s post-industrial edges, tracing the path of the tunnels and the site of the former Stockport Power Station where river and town meet. Along the way, site-specific sound compositions respond to the unique history of each location – industrial drones, electrical surges, reverberations of underground tunnels, and the discordant rhythms of the river as it was heated and contracted.

Experienced together, the installation and sound walk offer a way of listening closely to the river, reconsidering how it has been shaped through human activity – and how care might begin there too.