Sun Deck Set Cogitation—a new collaboratively realised work by John Young (Professor of Composition) and Simon Perril (Professor of Poetic Practice)—was premiered at the Sonic Cartography Conference: Soundscape, simulation and re-enactment on 28 October. The event was held at the Historic Dockyards in Chatham and organised jointly the the Universities of Kent and Greenwich https://research.kent.ac.uk/sonic-palimpsest/sc2022/ Sun Deck Set Cogitation work is an acousmatic setting of Perril’s text of the same name which is derived from two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: a detailed notebook description of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil and a 1941 voyage on which he escaped occupied France. The collaboration condenses found-text and found-sound into a spatialised palimpsest, cut up and re-mapped into a unique meditation on experience in-the-moment. The work was realised through an invitation to create a piece for the Game of Life 192-loudspeaker wave field synthesis system currently installed in the studio of the AΦE dance company, which itself is based in the Chatham Historic Dockyards. Wave field synthesis uses large numbers of densely arranged loudspeakers to generate highly realistic sound reproduction. DMU PhD alumna Louise Rossiter was also invited to create a new work for the wave field synthesis system at Sonic Cartography, focusing on the history of Everard's Brewery.
John Young's 8-channel composition Appartitions, commissioned in 2016 by the Distractfold Ensemble and premiered at the Bludenz Festival in Austria, also featured at Sonic Cartography in a concert on 30 October in the enormous 3 Slip space at the dockyards—a concert which included another DMU doctoral alumnus, Robin Parmar.
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| Composers in the final concert at Sonic Cartography in 3 Slip: L-R Annie Mahtani, John Young, Emma Margetson, Nadine Shütz, Cameron Naylor, Robin Parmar, Daria Baiocchi |
