DARKFIELD "Séance" review
The Darkfield phenomenon has been around for several years now. It’s an outfit that creates spooky ‘shows’ that are predominantly sound-led, using binaural headphone technology.
In Séance, the audience of 16 or so patrons, enters a shipping container and is seated either side of a long table. Tiny bells are suspended above the table, presumably similar to a 19th Century seance experience. They, and the tablecloth, are the only decoration.
We put on the headphones, put our hand on the table, the lights go out, and we listen to the show in complete darkness. Binaural audio recordings are ones that mimic the way ears work, eg two mics separated by a head-width, sometimes with a false head between them. The effect is that when you listen back, you get a very accurate representation of what it would sound like if you were actually there. (There’s a whole lot of scientific reasons why binaural sounds ‘realer’ that other recordings – head-spaced phase correlation, acoustic occlusion, bodily and environmental reflection considerations, etc – but I’d really rather talk about the art than the science.)
The recordings were presumably made in an actual shipping container (with its metallic reverb), so it sounds like the medium in the headphones is actually with you, walking along the table, whispering into your ear. Likewise they have some kind of mechanical device that bounces the table in time with the footsteps, to heighten the experience. There are audience responses baked into the soundtrack, so it feels like the medium is interacting with us. Like all good séances, it goes off the rails, and the conjured spirit that was supposed to be contained… well, you can guess the rest. (The other Darkfield experience was something call Flight which I really wanted to do, but frankly I don’t need any more reasons to be apprehensive about flying.)
I wish there were more of these around. There’s something that trawling through endless podcasts can’t do, which is capture that sense of common enjoyment that you get from going to something with strangers, like a play or a movie. In theory, binaural can just work at home, on the couch. But the ancillary elements, like the container, the bell, the mechanical thumper, and the other customers give the experience much more weight. While I thought it was a few minutes too short, and too dependant on very loud volume in places, I’m extremely pleased that there is still art being made that is sound-led, which can make its way to an audience outside the niche bunch of audiophiles.
I’d recommend you go and hear it for yourself, it’s definitely worth supporting. Someone please do the Flight one and let me know what it’s like.