Tombland (Event)

Discover the process behind Tombland: a fragmentary digital soundscape which blurs the boundaries between words, music and place.

At the end of 2020, Sunday Times Award-winning writer Jay Bernard and sound designer, music producer and DJ, Mwen spent a week together in the beautiful grounds of Dragon Hall – creating sounds and making up songs. A 15th-century medieval trading hall which has had many uses over time, Dragon Hall became a space for communing with the sheer weighty history present in the room. Join Jay and Mwen as they discuss the process behind making Tombland: a game in which you can re-mix the sounds they created during that week.

This event is part of the City of Literature programme, in partnership with National Centre for Writing.

Explore the full City of Literature programme here

Jay Bernard
Jay Bernard (FRSL FRSA) is a writer from London. Their work is interdisciplinary, critical, queer and rooted in the archive. They are the winner of the 2020 Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award. Their debut poetry collection Surge (Chatto and Windus, 2019), won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, T.S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize for Best First Collection, Dylan Thomas Prize, RSL Ondaatje Prize and John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize. They are an associate artist at the National Centre for Writing.

Jay’s short film Something Said has screened in the UK and internationally, including Aesthetica and Leeds International Film Festival (where it won best experimental and best queer short respectively), Sheffield DocFest and CinemAfrica. Jay is a programmer at BFI Flare, an archivist at Mayday Rooms and resident artist at Raven Row.

Mwen
Mwen has been working creatively with sound as an artist, producer, composer, DJ and session musician for a number of years. More recently Mwen’s creative output expanded to include sound design and composing for theatre, live performance and film. Mwen’s creative practice melds the worlds of music technology, electronic music, live sound and performance.

Mwen’s compositions and productions have received airplay on BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6, XFM, NTS, Rinse FM, been supported by DJs including Rob da Bank, Mary Anne Hobbs and Tom Robinson and synced to TV and fashion film.

Currently, Mwen is based in London and DJs regularly on the London club scene. Mwen is also in-house Ableton tutor at Hub16 Studios in East London.