SITE is a collaborative conceptual series curated by Driftworks and Audiobulb Records, exploring the relationship between sound and place. Each edition invites artists to recreate their personal perception of a location, blending environmental sounds and imagery to capture the unique ‘audio-geography’ of our world.
XII Sound is Alice DeVille whose SITE is the London Underground.
“It’s difficult to know when my phobia of the tube began. But at some point, something changed, and I began to experience an increasing dread of the tube. Something about the very shape of it – the enclosure, the beneath the ground feeling, the crush of people – and soon, getting stuck in tunnels even for a few minutes would cause me to break out in a sweat. Every journey became increasingly distressing, and I started to feel panic rising within me every time the doors closed.
Maybe to distract myself, I began to record my moments of fear and all that was happening in the tube at these times. Some of what you hear in Tube V is about this. Along with the fear, there is also a beautiful familiarity for me in the sounds of the London Underground. I grew up right next to Wimbledon Park station, and I remember falling asleep as a child to the squeak of brakes or the clunking, soothing rhythms of the trains. The familiar announcements, the snippets of conversation, and the sounds of life are deeply nostalgic and soothing for me.
1. Tube I
2. Tube II
3. Tube III
4. Tube IV
5. Tube V
6. Tube I - V
I have noticed that the tube, with its long windpipe, is a singer like me. At times in Tube V, I sing a duet with it.
I wanted to mix natural sounds (birdsong, rain, waves, stones on the beach) into the industrial so that you are not always sure what is a natural sound and what is mechanical or human-made (is it a voice or is it a train?). Almost like mixing paints to form new colours, I mixed these sounds perhaps to find my way back to nature, and to ease that grief of urban disconnection.
After years in the classical music world as an opera singer and flautist, discovering Ableton, and especially the Sampler, has been literally lifechanging for me. For many years previously, there had been music running around in my head but no way to capture it.
Back when I first started composing music in my younger years, I had only an 8-track recorder with a CD burner. I tried to make new sounds on that using my voice or recording various things from around the house, but it was never the music I heard in my head.
I sample sounds with my Zoom H2n recorder that I previously used to record my singing lessons on. I carry it everywhere with me, especially on the London Underground. When I first discovered Ableton and the Simpler, I felt almost feverish with possibility. Even to this day, I am dazzled by how it offers you the most incredible opportunity to make your own, totally unique instruments – even out of the subterranean sounds of the London Underground.”
XII Sound is Alice DeVille who is a composer, opera singer, former Co-Artistic Director of Opera in Space, and a voice and communication coach.
Following her training at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and the ENO Works programme, Alice has performed extensively across Europe and at venues such as Glyndebourne, Wigmore Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and St John Smith’s Square.
As Co-Artistic Director of Arts Council Funded Opera in Space, Alice devised and performed in multiple sold-out productions, including The Semele Project (UK and Berlin tour), 5 Tales of Love and Madness, and 5 Tales of the Sea, fusing classical music with poetry, theatre, and storytelling to reshape traditional opera and recital formats.
Alice’s current work explores the intersection of natural and industrial soundscapes, creating sonic environments that reflect themes of healing and ecological connection in the face of the climate crisis. Her track Tube VI was selected for No Fixed Mix, a sound design program for female and non-binary composers at String and Tins.
Alice is also a voice teacher with over 20 years of teaching experience. She runs The Authentic Communicator, a voice and communication training company, where she helps individuals develop greater freedom in communication, including through expressive voice work.
Public transport is rarely described as a site of intimacy. More often it’s a shared inconvenience, a moving container of mild irritation and suppressed eye contact. Yet for Alice DeVille, working under the name XII Sound, the London Underground becomes something stranger: a nervous system, a memory archive, and, inconveniently, a source of anxiety.
"Tube V", released as part of the SITE series by Driftworks and Audiobulb, is built from that contradiction. Fear and familiarity occupy the same acoustic space, and instead of resolving the tension, DeVille leans into it. The result is not quite a document, not quite a composition. More like a set of controlled exposures, where the artist repeatedly enters the environment that unsettles her and listens until it begins to change shape.
DeVille’s background as an opera singer and flautist is not incidental here. You can hear it in the way she treats sound as something physical, embodied, almost architectural. But instead of projecting into grand halls, her voice folds itself into tunnels, compressing, echoing, blending with mechanical noise. At times, she quite literally duets with the infrastructure. Which sounds poetic until you realize the infrastructure is a train braking at high frequency.
The opening sequence - “Tube I” through “Tube IV” - functions like a gradual descent. Snippets of announcements, metallic rhythms, fragments of conversation, and processed environmental sounds begin to overlap. DeVille introduces natural elements—birdsong, water, subtle field textures—not as contrast but as camouflage. The boundaries blur. Is that a train or a breath? A rail screech or a manipulated voice? The uncertainty is deliberate, and slightly disorienting.
By the time we reach “Tube V”, the album’s conceptual core becomes clearer. The space is no longer purely external. The tube has been internalized, transformed into a kind of resonant chamber where memory, panic, and nostalgia circulate. The childhood recollection of falling asleep to train sounds coexists with the adult experience of claustrophobia. Comfort and dread share the same frequency band.
The closing piece, “Tube I–V”, gathers these fragments into a longer form, less a summary than a reconfiguration. Motifs reappear, textures overlap more densely, and the listening experience becomes almost spatial. You don’t just hear the work; you seem to move through it, as if the tunnels had been reassembled inside your head.
Technically, the album sits somewhere between microsound, ambient composition, and electroacoustic collage. But labels feel slightly inadequate here. What matters more is the method: recording, sampling, reshaping, and recontextualizing everyday sounds until they reveal hidden emotional contours. DeVille’s use of tools like Ableton’s Simpler is not about virtuosity but about transformation. The mundane becomes unstable, then strangely expressive.
There’s also an undercurrent of ecological thinking running through the work. By blending natural and industrial sounds so thoroughly, DeVille resists the easy binary between “organic” and “artificial”. The city is not separate from nature; it is another ecosystem, just louder and less forgiving. "Tube V" suggests that reconnection might not come from escaping these environments, but from listening to them more carefully. Which is a slightly uncomfortable proposition, given how most people experience rush hour.
What prevents the album from becoming a purely conceptual exercise is its emotional honesty. The fear is not aestheticized into something neat. It lingers, unresolved. But alongside it, there is curiosity, even tenderness. The tube is not only a site of panic; it is also a place of memory, of rhythm, of accidental music.
In the end, "Tube V" feels like a negotiation. Between body and architecture, between control and overwhelm, between the human voice and the mechanical systems that surround it.
Not the most relaxing commute you’ll ever take. But certainly one of the more revealing.
Original review > HERE
A new release titled “Tube V” from XII Sound, the project of London-based composer and sound artist Alice DeVille, will be released in the coming days. This heavily sample-based work is part of the new SITE series, a conceptual collaboration between Driftworks and Audiobulb Records that explores the relationship between sound and place. The release will be available digitally from Audiobulb. Tube V takes the London Underground seriously not only as a recording location, but also as a sonic and psychological space for experience. The starting point, as DeVille herself describes, is her ambivalent relationship with the mode of transport, characterized by increasing anxiety but also by deep familiarity. Field recordings from trains, tunnels, announcements, and conversations are combined with vocals, electronic processing, and subtle layers of sound. Industrial noises are interwoven with natural sounds such as birdsong, rain, or the sound of the sea, deliberately blurring the boundaries between mechanical, human, and organic sounds. Alice DeVille is a trained opera singer and flautist who has performed at venues including the Royal Albert Hall, Wigmore Hall, and Glyndebourne. In addition to her compositional work, she is a voice and communication trainer. Her current artistic interests lie in the connection between urban and natural soundscapes, as well as in questions of healing, perception, and ecological alienation.
Original review > HERE
Composer, teacher and opera singer Alice DeVille aka XII Sound , launches the SITE series through the collaboration of the labels Driftworks and Audiobulb Records, asking an artist to create through sound, a place that evokes an experience of their own. With Tube V , Alice DeVille plunges us into the depths of the London Underground, of which she has the greatest phobia. Armed with her Zoom H2n recorder which she carries with her at all times, she records the natural sounds she encounters during her travels, mixing them with those of the Tube (subway), wrapped in dotted vocals, all processed through Ableton. The result is subtle and captivating, offering glimpses of reality distorted by manipulation and juxtaposition, yet firmly rooted in everyday life. Reality transforms into an artistic virtuality nourished by fragments and sequences, field recordings, and melodies traversing tunnels of fear with a menacing beauty. Majestic.
Original review > HERE
XII Sound, aka Alice DeVille, has conquered her fear of the Underground with her own music, turning it into a positive experience. Using vocals, Ableton, and Simpler, she transforms her field recordings of the London Underground into highly listenable, distinctive music. It's quite possible that we'll soon perceive the Underground with different ears.
Original review > HERE
