Keele Research Repository

Programme notes: Dammtor is a visual music work based on the poem of the same title by James Sheard, which tells a vivid tale of memories, longing and desolation in the old travel hub in the Rotherbaum quarter of the city of Hamburg. The film features audio and video materials linked to the words, metaphors and overall essence of the text. Recordings of voice actors, reading and whispering passages of the poem, feature predominantly in the montage. The reciting voices trigger visual and sonic reflections on the otherwise unadorned snapshots evoked by the poem. Hence the verses, the sonic anecdotes and the imagery all become entangled in a web of reciprocal allusions. Yet, the crux of this film is not the disclosure of a truth hidden behind the poem’s disconnected threads; if anything, it is to linger with our senses over the rifts that the poem opens amidst the strands of an unspoken tale: not a story… but a story about a story. (notes by the composer)