** Binaural Sound - Please Wear Headphones **

Live performance with multichannel spatialisation.
First performed at World Stage Design 2022, Calgary via remote stream as part of Sound Kitchen

Rat’s Nest is a Sonic Ghosting work that explores the idea of performance spaces as resonant chambers for fractured, multi-layered, sonic temporalities reflecting the work they house, the people who make, perform, design and experience it, and the communities and histories they are connected to as peopled places.

Having worked across a broad range of performance projects as a sound designer, composer and artist, and in particular on a number of site-specific, immersive and experimental pieces, I have often found myself working in spaces that are reconfigured or co-opted as ‘performance spaces’ – warehouses, museums, industrial buildings – as well as more typical theatres, studios, galleries and concert halls. In some cases, the work engages or resonates deliberately with an obvious history of the space/place in question, but in others the design ethos of the project sees the space as a ‘black box’. However, much as we might try to ignore, or engage directly with, the ‘history’ of a performance space, these spaces resonate with the multi-layered experiences of different people – performers, crew, audience, factory workers, museum staff, local communities. Where some of this can be ‘seen’ in the fabric of the building, the sonic resonances of these multiple histories/perspectives/memories are harder to hear.

Rat’s Nest engages with these ideas through the practice I have developed called Sonic Ghosting – a practice that offers a way to interrogate the relationship between space/place/memory and sound/music/noise by fracturing the soundscape of the present with the echoes, phantoms and potentialities of the soundscapes of the past/future.

This new composition explores my own experiences of ‘performance’ spaces, disrupting these to seak out the ghosts of the spaces/places themselves through an act of creative conjury. The sonic materials used in the piece are gleaned from recordings and sections of my own previous composition and design work, recordings made in and around various performance spaces including the peripheral spaces of the control rooms/areas, scene docks and store rooms. These materials are fractured, processed and manipulated to create a new samplescapes and sounds that reflect my own memories of these spaces, and the multi-layered, multi-temporal perspectives inherent in the concept of spaces as resonant chambers.

Rat's Nest live at World Stage Design 2022 (Binaural)

Danny Bright is a sound designer, composer, recordist, and sonic manipulator working across the fields of music, performance, installation, theatre and media. He has lived, studied and worked in Sheffield, England; Burlington, Vermont, USA; and Brighton and Hove, England where he is currently based. His practice explores the boundaries between sound/music/noise and space/place/memory; he is currently developing multi-modal compositional, performance, critical and installation work investigating sonic temporalities and auditory ‘ghostings’. Danny performs on guitar, samplescapes, tape, text/voice, and electronics as an ensemble member/leader, solo artist and free improviser. He also works as a sound designer and composer for internationally recognised arts, theatre and media companies, and as a producer, recordist, sound technologist and engineer.

Danny’s work has appeared on Channel 4, at the Hatton Gallery, Brighton Digital Festival, Victoria & Albert Museum, Prague Quadrennial, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, MAGNA Science Adventure Centre, World Soundscape Conference, Summerhall Edinburgh, British Science Festival, Manchester, Newcastle & Brighton Science Festivals, Edinburgh, Bedford & Brighton Fringe Festivals, and toured the UK, Europe, Australia and the USA. Commissions and supporting organisations include: Catalyst Arts, Arts Council England & Heritage Lottery Fund, Dept. for Culture, Media and Sport, New Music Players, Octopus Collective, MAGNA Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council as funder of his ongoing doctoral research in Music at the University of Sussex.

Rat's Nest live at World Stage Design 2022 (Binaural)

Danny Bright

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