Output details

Three Returns

Three Returns is part of the Three Cities Project by three composers - Pete Stollery, Ross Whyte and Suk-Jun Kim, and uses the sound recordings collected by the team while they were making journeys to three cities, Aberdeen, Bergen and St. Petersberg.

This two-year long project works with the premise that we experience a place not only by being there physically, but through the experience of others and by conjuring up an imaginary place. The sense of place is a multi-layered experience where the role of remembering and imagining is as important as the lived experience of now.

Through the design of the project two composers traveled to one of the three cities and experienced the being-there with the remaining composer forced to rely on the experiences of the others and employ imagination freely in reliving the place. For the composer, St Petersburg was not visited and he relied on the others experience to know the city.

Three Returns is the composer's revisit to the sound materials, some of which were collected directly by the composer and some collected by others. Through the revisit, the composer wanted to become sensitive to what he had experienced, remembered, forgotten and imagined. To the composer, Three Returns evidences both the fragility of memory and the fascination of place - the very reason for which place haunts us.

Three Returns was supported by Sound festival and was premiered on 24 April 2012 at MUSA, Aberdeen, Scotland