As part of a joint project with the sculpture course, we were asked to produce a work under the brief 'Heaven'. My response to this was to make something which was quite the opposite of heaven, but used something very much associated with heaven, or at least the idea of it. I decided to make a work using a number of songs which have the word 'heaven' in their title. Using 14 of these songs I editted them so that all the songs would play simultaneously at once, the result was cacophonous, making it very hard to distinguish individual songs from the barrage of noise created by all the others. The idea was to take a different people’s ideas of heaven and show that they are always different and not in ‘harmony’, i.e. there is no definitive heaven.

The recording was played back on audio cassette, with people being made to listen from start to finish, rather than on a loop.

> click here to download mp3

(running time 5 minutes 7 seconds)

1. Jackie Wilson Said (I’m In Heaven When You Smile) – Van Morrison
2. Show Me Heaven – Maria McKee
3. I Found Heaven – Take That
4. Stairway To Heaven – Led Zeppelin
5. South Of Heaven – Slayer
6. Heaven – Lamb
7. Monkey Gone To Heaven – Pixies
8. Just Like Heaven – The Cure
9. Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now – The Smiths
10. Little Trip to Heaven (On The Wings Of Your Love) – Tom Waits
11. Heaven Is A Place On Earth – Belinda Carlisle
12. Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel – Tavares
13. Heaven For Everyone – Queen
14. I Wonder If Heaven Got A Ghetto – 2Pac