About
“Dad, you’re lost
slipped the mesh
gone back to source
back to Deadwater’s
tin glint & black moss”
Black Fell is an interactive digital opera: a story in song, in which you control the path the narrative takes and the way the music evolves.
You are an astronomer, returned to childhood haunts near Kielder Forest in Northumberland after many years abroad. The observatory above the forest was almost a second home to your father and you find yourself there again tonight. While a host of enthusiastic amateurs huddle in hope of a brief gap in the clouds, you prefer solitude in the darkness and reflect on the path that brought you to this point.
You circle fragments of memory, some pure, some bittersweet, some fierce. Your inner voice wanders through the landscape of your youth and and as you replay these scenes over and again in altered sequence you notice your emotions shifting. Nevertheless, each path seems to lead to the same point, leaving you no less lost, perhaps, but at least somewhere clear, between grief and forgiveness.
The opera
Using the arrow keys or WSAD to move and the mouse or trackpad to look, you can walk through a virtual landscape in which music will emerge from all around you. Your inner voice sings as she passes through the space. You can follow her – or not, as you choose.
Your position within the landscape determines the type of music you will hear and the balance of the various elements. Similarly, at the points where the storyline branches, your location provides the chosen path for continuation.
All paths converge at the same point, but each playthrough only gives you part of the story. It will take multiple journeys to encounter all the fragments of memory and build a picture of your past. Every playing will be unique as the music is constantly renewed and so the same unit of song will have a different musical interpretation each time you encounter it – the degree of similarity or difference depending to a large extent on where you are within the landscape.
You can navigate entirely by ear, with a blank screen (or by closing your eyes). This is perhaps closest to the astronomer at the forest’s edge, the clammy night shutting out all light. But this can be a disorienting experience and therefore a simple visualisation of a pale woodland is provided which will assist you gauging the impact of your movements; there is also a minimap which can help you locate and return to landmarks in order to directly control the musical elements. These features can be made invisible by pressing ‘v’ (for the forest) and ‘m’ (for the minimap).
Black Fell is most effective using headphones. Each journey lasts 9-13 minutes.
