In September 2022 three creative teams spent a week at Alderley Edge, immersing themselves in the site and its legend. Working with oral histories and creative versions of the legend of the Edge encountered in the context of focus groups and discussions with local stakeholders, the teams produced distinct soundscapes reinterpreting the legend.

These videos use performances recorded for the Invisible Alderley augmented reality app (launching 21st December 2022), as well as footage of the site-specific composition practices employed by the three groups at key locations across the Edge.

Nayan Kulkarni & Lunatraktors

Nayan Kulkarni explores the production of place and atmosphere with light, video and sound installation. His projects grow from responses to specific sites and localities through extended engagements with their landscapes and histories. The research is diverse, for example; historical archival material, appropriated film fragments, and collaborative projects examining colonial architectures and landscapes. Kulkarni’s Anglo-Indian perspective informs how he positions subjectivity in the artworks through dramatizing the tensions between ideological, historical and embodied viewpoints.

Artworks span the intimacy of a fragment of reflected domestic light to multimedia installations that fill buildings and cover architectures. Recent major projects include; Room for a Pinoleptic (Somerset House, 2020), Pilgrim (Selby Abbey, 2019) and Blade (Hull UK City of Culture 2017).

Margate-based ‘broken folk’ duo Lunatraktors make research-based performances rooted in body and voice: dance and gesture, body percussion, speech, vocal harmony and overtone singing. The result is an experimental fusion of live art and folk music, moving between theatre stages, museum and gallery spaces, music venues and festivals. Drawing on British folk heritage and influences from contemporary art, theatre and music, Lunatraktors combine the talents of percussionist, dancer and choreographer Carli Jefferson with research artist, composer and folk singer Clair Le Couteur.

 Since their founding in 2017, Lunatraktors have created performances, commissions and lectures for the V&A Museum, the Turner Prize opening weekend, Ramsgate Festival of Sound, Folkestone Museum, Goldsmiths, Royal College of Art, TEDx, and arts spaces and festivals across the UK, Europe and America. Their self-released debut ‘This Is Broken Folk’ was listed in MOJO Magazine’s top ten folk albums of 2019. You can listen to, and support their music, on bandcamp.

Nick Hennessy, John Dipper, and Elizabeth Garner

The collaborative work of storyteller Hennessy, musician and composer Dipper, and scriptwriter Garner has a particular focus on the history of Alderley Edge, and the charged relationship between story and landscape. The three worked collaboratively on the 2016 three-part installation Over and Nether, which took the town of Alderley Edge as its focus. As part of Invisible Worlds, they will develop a new commission focused on the legend, specific to the interests and ambitions of the project.

Owl Project

Owl Project is a collaborative group of Manchester-based artists consisting of Simon Blackmore, Antony Hall, and Steve Symons. They work with wood and electronics to fuse sculpture and sound art, creating music making machines, interfaces and objects which mix pre-steam and digital technologies. The result is a distinctive range of musical and sculptural instruments that critique human interaction with computer interfaces and our increasing appetite for new and often disposable technologies.