Sun Deck Set Cogitation (audio installation: Historic Dockyard Chatham version)

Sun Deck Set Cogitation is a setting of the first set (‘deck one’) of Simon Perril’s poem of the same name which is derived from the contents of two texts by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss—a highly detailed and densely descriptive moment by moment account of a sunset written in 1935 while en route from Marseilles to Brazil and another written on the 1941 voyage on which he escaped occupied France. Furthermore, Perril’s compositional approach takes impetus from an epiphany Lévi-Strauss had early in his career looking at the formal intricacy and structural play of dandelion seed heads that give rise to other forms. Perril’s poetic ‘treatment’ of the source texts scatter and recombine word-seeds in surprising combinations: blowing on a seed-head and spreading palimpsestic filaments. This process is further reflected in Young’s acousmatic ‘treatment’ of Perril’s reading, extracting and processing vocal fragments and working these into a new palimpsest of textual material and digital sound design. The Historic Dockyard Chatham version of this work was created as a prototype for the final Phoenix Leicester version [https://hdl.handle.net/2086/22848] It consists of a single variation on Perril’s reading of 'deck one' realised spatially on the Game of Life 192-loudspeaker wave field synthesis system in the A+E Lab Central Boiler House Chatham Historic Dockyard Chatham, as part of the University of Kent‘s ‘Sonic Cartography: soundscape, simulation and re-enactment’ conference, 28-30 October 2022.