Performance

composer talk at noon | concert at 7pm | 4 November 2026

Sonic Lab, Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland

Description

Robin Parmar creates sound works that explore relationships with time, memory, and the phenomenal world. For this concert he will present two new compositions created for the multichannel speaker system in the Sonic Lab, along with an older piece specially reconfigured for this environment. These are the result of a week-long residency at SARC in August of this year.

Drawing on the history of field recording and electroacoustic music, Robin reimagines a poetic process of improvisation that is ecocentric, free of the extractive ideologies of soundscape composition. By leveraging noise as generative material, these works encourage accidents of listening and other phenomenological affects. The lecture will frame these topics within his recent research output.

Programme notes

The Garden of Adumbrations (8:48)

This piece is an environmental composition representing my home in Limerick, Ireland. It follows an intense period in which I made field recordings from daily life. This is my response to the soundscape, a providential concept which asserts that nature requires curation in order to ensure beauty. “The Garden of Adumbrations” (2009) places the listener in a sonic milieu where ongoing processes present challenges to the act of listening. This field of noises encourages accidents of listening and other processes of the imagination. Listeners hear different sounds in this collage, some of which were never present.

Thanks to DMARC at the University of Limerick.

Present Time (wee mix) (8:40)

The album Present Time was recently released on Silent Records. The sonic material is entirely taken from Vera Lynn’s 1942 recording of “The White Cliffs of Dover.” Having lived through the Blitz of London, this remained one of my mother’s favourite songs. Mavis Joan Parmar passed away this year; this piece is dedicated to her memory.

Techniques of frequency extraction return the song to the immanent field of possibilities from which phenomena are formed. Active listening makes tangible the relational nature of experience. We perceive sound in a thick present that includes what we heard just moments prior, along with our expectations of the future. Temporal paradoxes can be demonstrated experimentally. A sound we will hear in 50 milliseconds can mask a sound we are hearing “now.” We are time travellers within our phenomenal fields.

The album was originally mixed for binaural listening. This version recomposes the material for the dome plus the 20-channel IKO speaker.

Thanks to Trevor Wishart and the Composers Desktop Project.

Electricity (for David Lynch) (8:27)

We live in a sea of invisible traceries created by microwave towers, radio broadcasting, WiFi networks, and other ubiquitous technologies. Our mobile phones and cameras are not passive devices but instead contribute to the complex textured electromagnetic fields in which we all swim. Our bodies are conduits and amplifiers for these intersecting fields, but like deep-sea fish we are blind. “Electricity” (2026) traces a path from power generation at a Spanish wind turbine to electromagnetism in my computer system. The result highlights forces that are usually beyond phenomenal apprehension. This piece is dedicated to David Lynch, who was similarly fascinated.

Thanks to Linda O Keeffe and Tony Doyle for hosting the residency in La Fatarella, Taragona.

Thanks

The composer wishes to thank John D’Arcy, Craig Jackson, Jonny McGuinness, and Pedro Rebelo for this opportunity, which was based on a week-long residency in August 2026.