Crossing (Bergen) forms part of the multi-media Three Cities Project commissioned by the sound festival and co-created by a team of sound artists/composers comprising Stollery, Ross Whyte and Suk-Jun Kim.

Bergen was the city I did not visit as part of the Three Cities Project. Listening to the short recording of the Vesta passenger ferry crossing the harbour in Bergen, made by Ross Whyte, I decided to strip down the recording to its constituent parts, or at least what I perceived those parts to be, as I had no first hand experience of the sounds: three soundings of the boat's whistle, some background ambience of water and seagulls, the "chug" of the boat's engine.

On listening more deeply I began to mask the images associated with these sounds and started to listen to their musical potential: the gradual crescendo of the chug, its timbral variation, particularly as the boat seems to move away after the climax with the reflections of the sound from what I imagine to be various structures and surfaces, a sense of space and the movement of the sounds within that space.

This phenomenological reduction afforded me the opportunity to provide a new narrative for the sounds one which is much less "boaty" and more to do with what these invisible sounds said to me.

Crossing (Bergen) was premiered at MUSA, Aberdeen on 22nd April 2012.