Junkerry: Innovations in Spatial Sound - visits the UK in 2019!!

Junkerry’s adventures into spatial sound are a genre bending blend of music, visuals and technology. Introducing original immersive experiences to her audiences. Junkerry has worked with Google Tilt, The V&A and won awards for sound scores at NASA and Los Angeles Film Festivals.

She is back in 2019 with Amaurosis, a collaboration with visual artist Lucy Hardcastle and King’s College and is heading out this November to perform the immersive, experiential pieces at planetariums in Bristol, Plymouth and Birmingham.

Specialising in spatial/4D sound, Junkerry brings music into the future, embracing the duality between sound and vision. She moves away from MP3s and streaming, which could be considered to de-value music and aims to bring sound onto a level with the high definition realism we experience in film.

Storytelling is a major theme in her work and her audiences are sent on a journey, where their own minds create a narrative – straight from their subconscious. Participants wear blind-folds so they can take a hiatus from everyday life and enter into this flowing stream of consciousness, while listening intensely to the music. The 8-speaker spatial sound composition transports them right inside the music, as sounds move around them, from speaker to speaker – blurring the lines between subjective and objective reality.

Junkerry explains, “Spatial tools allow me to choreograph and play with sound. I can literarily place the audience inside the music score. So they have a deeper connection with what they hear.”

The sound for the installation is a 40 minute piece produced by Junkerry in conjunction with Kings College, where they have been developing futuristic sound. In the excerpt below you can experience a snippet of the performance, in this atmospheric soundscape, a shimmering array of instruments are accompanied by the haunting vocals of Junkerry, her daughter Jun and 3000monks. Creating ambient layers of binaural sound, giving an elusive flow of energy, as speakers move from one to the other, dancing from one movement to the next. The sounds are almost tangible, as they aim to be as real and 4D as possible, with sound effects, atmosphere and a moving brilliance as tidal waves of sound whoosh in and around you.

Junkerry creates, “a new kind of performance, where each person in the audience has a personal encounter with the music and visuals.”

Amaurosis is a condition where tired or over-worked eyes can cause a temporary loss of vision and vision switches off, lasting from 30 seconds up to hours. Junkerry poses questions around perception and how the person might experience their surroundings differently in that period of time.

As a person is awakened, is their world more vivid? In the show, after 30 minutes of intense listening blindfolds are taken off and they encounter Lucy Hardcastle’s visuals, as abstract graphics and textures lull us back into the present.

Here is a short excerpt of Amaurosis, listen with headphones for full binaural experience: