John Young and Simon Perril @ States of Independence 2024

Profs. John Young and Simon Perril will give a talk and present their immersive audio installation Sun Set Deck Cogitation at the annual States of Independence festival of creative writing on 8 June, 10am-4pm in the DMU Clephan Building.

States of Independence brings together publishers and writers for a one-day festival of talks, performances and book stalls.  The keynote speaker this year is Louise Doughty.

Sun Set Deck Cogitation can be heard throughout the day in PACE Studio 1, and the presentation will also celebrate the launch of Perril's Two Duets with Occasion which includes the poetry used in the installation.

The programme for the day can be found here, and admission is free.

 

 

John Young Launches Two CDs at Cultural Exchanges 2024

John Young (Professor of Composition) will launch two new compact discs at the 2024 DMU Cultural Exchanges Festival, in PACE Studio 1, 28 February, 2024 at 5-6pm.

The discs are published by the Montréal publisher Empreintes DIGITALes and will be available in CD and high definition download.

The first disc, Histoires de soldats (Soldiers' Stories), incorporates two works based on oral history recordings. An Angel at Mons contains John Ewings's eye witness account of an angel on the battlefield at Mons, Belgium, in August 1914. Ewings gave an interview about his life to the BBC Northern Ireland in 1980 at the age of  101, and sections of that interview are incorporated into the work with the BBC's kind permission. Once He was Gunner is a more extended work (56 minutes) based on interviews John made with his father about war experiences as an 8th Army soldier in Italy 1943-45.

The second disc, Espaces lointains (Faraway Spaces), presents six works composed between 2017 and 2023, Three Spaces in Mid-Air, Sweet Anticipation, Hidden Spaces, Arioso, Le chant en dehors and Filaments and Phases. Filaments and Phases is a collaborative work with DMU Professor of Poetic Practice Simon Perril and in 2022 Le chant en dehors was awarded the inaugural Prix Francis-Dhomont at the AKOUSMA Festival in Montréal.

Information and booking at https://www.culturalexchanges.co.uk/2024-lineup/professor-john-young
The full Cultural Exchanges programme for 2024 is at https://www.culturalexchanges.co.uk/2024-lineup

New work by John Young and Simon Perril at Electroacoustic Spring in Rethymno, Crete

John Young's new work Filaments and Phases (2023) will be premiered at the Electroacoustic Spring 2023 Festival in Rethymno, Greece on Saturday 3 June.  The piece is a further setting of a section of Simon Perril's poem Sun Deck Set Cogitation—also used by John and Simon in two installations: at the Historic Dockyard Chatham and at Phoenix Cinema and Arts Centre, Leicester in late 2022 and March 2023 respectively—the latter as part of DMU's Cultural Exchanges Festival. Filaments and Phases is an 8-channel immersive audio work with Perril's reading of his text embedded as the sound is taken apart and reassembled into new and evocative sound forms.

https://mta.hmu.gr/en/activities/musical-events/electroacoustic-spring-2023/

 

 

New work by John Young and Simon Perril at Sonic Cartography Conference

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.

 

 

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

John Young and Louise Rossiter with the Wave Field Synthesis system at AΦE Labs