What Happened to Seaton Snook? A Parafictional Archive of Sounds and Music from an Abandoned Seaside Town

Abstract

This practice-based PhD takes the form of a web-based archive of sounds and music from a parafictional seaside town in North East England called Seaton Snook, and an accompanying commentary. The archive features a wide range of individual sound pieces across a range of materialities, including artistic compositions, pedagogic compositions, recorded musical performances and field recordings. It also includes interviews and transcriptions, photographs of handwritten scores, and accompanying explanatory information. The project draws on Carrie Lambert-Beatty’s notion of parafiction (artistic practices that play in the overlap between fact and fiction) and Peter Cusack’s practice of sonic journalism, to investigate aspects of twentieth century and contemporary North Eastern English culture. More broadly, this project investigates how listener experience can be shaped by the stories we tell about musical works, the compositional process, and social and biographical aspects surrounding the work. The commentary first reviews a range of related artworks, to situate the work and to introduce the key concepts and frameworks. This section is completed with in-depth discussion of a number of noteworthy parafictional artworks – including case studies of works by artist Damien Hirst, composer Jennifer Walshe and filmmaker Peter Greenaway – and an assessment of the cultural and economic neglect of the North East of England. There follows an explanation of my methodology and an exegesis of my own compositions, drawing on language and frameworks established in earlier parts of the commentary. A creative approach to the exegesis is taken, in order to further demonstrate and explore the parafictional character of the main project. The commentary concludes with a discussion of possible further artistic and pedagogic outcomes of Seaton Snook.

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