Abandoned industrial landscapes are brought to life in sound

A new interactive experience offers players the chance to explore eerie industrial landscapes, and become 'ear-witnesses' to an nonliving world.

The visionaries behind the project - sound artists David Denyer and Sami El-Enany - have long been interested in using found sounds in their compositions. A number of trips to abandoned factories to gather field recordings inspired them to let audiences experience their art in a more interactive way.

Deadly Structures is a sound-only video game in which players can roam around a sentient wasteland. Navigating a virtual space, they interact with their surroundings, and are free to interpret what they hear in different ways.

For Denyer and El-Enany, their first steps into non-visual game design required dedication and a militant focus. "Unlike even the most ambitious and sprawling pieces of music, a game has a way of totally consuming its creators," they explained. "Even the smallest change or new idea during development could add a hundred things to our to-do list." However, the pair believe the painstaking design process was worth the effort.

The project allowed the designers to explore a shared passion. "We have always loved video games as a vehicle for expression and joy. We love the agency offered by non-linear art, especially video games. As contemporary composers, we are always looking for new ways to convey, express and engage with our audience. The notion of a non-linear, living composition is an infinitely exciting one."

The project - and the chance to work with a talented team drawn together as a result of the New Creatives initiative - proved a valuable learning experience. "During development we learned that game development is unlike any other art form in that it is fundamentally iterative," the pair revealed. "Play testing can determine how successful we have been in communicating an idea and reveal a path forward."

Denyer and El-Enany will continue innovating in game and performative spaces and have ambitions to create a linear soundtrack of their game Deadly Structures. "While Deadly Structures' true form is a video game, we are excited to release a soundtrack version of the game as an analogous experience. We have also talked about adapting it into a performance piece and indeed did devise a live performance version of the game for the opening night of the exhibition at the ICA, where the project was showcased."

Sami El-Enany works with sound, often negotiating the fringes of new instrumental, electronic and field recording. His practices range widely from composition and sound design for the screen to sound art, theatre, record production and radio production. He is a regular producer for Short Cuts on BBC Radio 4 and Between the Ears on BBC Radio 3 - his most recent work in this field being recognised with a Best New Radio Producer nomination at the Audio Production Awards. His film score for Walking With Shadows, the first ever LGBTQ+ Nollywood feature film, was recognised with an Africa Movie Academy Award nomination for Best Soundtrack. His work has filled spaces in the Barbican, Tate, ICA and the National Theatre. El-Enany is also a pianist and improvisor, performing solo and in ensembles across the world.

David Denyer is a composer, violinist and sound artist. His work is challenging, striving to explore the darkest and most uncomfortable corners of sound. David is active in London's experimental theatre scene. His recent work with Collide Theatre, Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2019), sought to expose the horrors of ostracism through a score built on familiar classical tradition, warped beyond recognition. Their experimental opera, Troy (2018), aimed to expose the complicity of their own audiences in the violent atrocities of war. Other theatre work, with Dirty Rascals, explores the blurring of the lines between musical performance, drama and performance art.

Fascinated by non-linear art, David joined the Faceless game development team as a composer, sound designer and programmer in 2014, helping them release their first videogame (The Sorrowvirus: A Faceless Short Story) in 2019. He also composes for film (being featured recently on HBO and National Geographic), and live art, and he currently plays in a number of London-based bands. He is a keen programmer and electronics enthusiast, having written computer programs and built acoustic devices from a very young age.

Together David and Sami have founded Wormtea, a game and sound studio which aims to expand the possibility of interactive sound and storytelling through their own projects as well as collaborations with other game studios.