THE ENCHANTED FOREST

Jon has co-composed music and sound with RJ McConnell for The Enchanted Forest since 2013, collaborating with lighting designers as well as other contributors, from video artists (59 Productions & NOVAK Collective) to sculptors (Illumaphonium) and aerial performers (All or Nothing). It is a huge and highly-accoladed son et lumière held each autumn and set around Loch Dunmore in Faskally Wood in Perthshire attracting over 80,000 visitors each year, and winning many cultural and tourism awards, including the UK's Best Cultural Event in 2016. For the 2019 show Cosmos, the co-designers were composers RJ McConnell and Rachel Cullen, lighting designers Kate Bonney and Simon Hayes, and producer Zoë Squair.

381 x 10³ was written for the first major installation the audience encountered in the 2019 show Cosmos. The title is the kilometric measure of lunar distance from Faskally Woods on the opening night of the show; here is just a stereo remix, but this palindromic 6’30” piece was originally relayed from a circular array of speakers, fully immersing the visitors who journeyed between suspended inflatable sculptures via a raised platform through the tree canopy.

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Each year, the audience makes a promenade around a series of installations, some static and sonically more ambient, and some much larger set-piece shows, each usually between 5 and 8 minutes in duration. Ranging massively in style and genre, these narrative pieces are self-consciously dramatic and cinematic, blending synthetic, found and sampled sounds with real instrumentalists and vocalists, and relayed on a large networked sound system.

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2018: of the wild

This year’s show saw a return of the water-screen projection technique from 2016 for On The Water, a show describing a year in the natural world, moving through all four seasons and accompanied by stunning 3D graphics from the NOVAK collective.

At the far end of the loch, In The Trees was a finale blending an Afro-celtic vibe with a depiction of creatures of the forest, ranging from the microscopic to the prehistoric…

2016: SHIMMER

Shimmer was the principal piece of 2016 which, as well as lighting, featured video projection and animation by Tony Award-winning 59 Productions. At its climax it featured a magical bird projected onto a screen of water falling back into the loch, which 'flew' in 3D up and over the heads of the audience.

2014: ELEMENTAL

Ice, one of the two largest pieces in the 2014 'Elemental' show, starts imperceptibly with glacial wind, bells and ice cracking, and travels through arpeggiated mallet rhythms and monumental orchestral passages to the colourful organ mixtures and overtones of the coda.

Lightning, sited in the dell that drops away at one end of the loch, used a multi-speaker system to exploit the natural acoustic of the site and to play with its scale and depth. It contains huge dynamic contrasts, from the opening orchestral hits and fizzing tesla coils to the pianissimo single crotale at 2'36”.

2015: FLUX

In 2015 and 2016 a temporary platform was extended from the pathway into the dell, taking the audience right into the tree canopy as the ground falls away. The music was written specifically to be mixed in 7:1 surround sound, with all the sounds sweeping around and enveloping the audience. Chronos has a steampunk time-travel aesthetic with whirring, chiming clocks and a stuttering scissoring sound that introduces new episodes, which range from lush orchestral, through 'futuristic' synths, to comedic big band, until a final 'shutdown' cue. This stereo mix gives only an impression of the actual experience.

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