Black Fell is an interactive online digital opera, a game for music. This is to say that it tells a story in song and music, and that your actions as a listener-player influence the direction the story takes, and the music that is used to present that story. It is all played within a web browser on your computer.
You take the part of an astronomer, returned to childhood haunts in Kielder forest n Northumberland after many years abroad. The observatory above the forest was almost a second home to your father and you find yourself there again tonight. While a host of enthusiastic amateurs huddle in hope of a brief gap in the clouds, you prefer solitude in the darkness and reflect on the path that brought you to this point.
You circle fragments of memory, some pure, some bittersweet, some fierce. Your inner voice wanders through the landscape of your youth and and as you replay these scenes over and again in altered sequence you notice your emotions shifting. Nevertheless, each path seems to lead to the same point, leaving you no less lost, perhaps, but at least somewhere clear, between grief and forgiveness.
Black Fell developed by Martin Suckling and Frances Leviston, performed by Jonathan Morton and Loré Lixenberg, with software development by Marco Ng and John Gray. It was funded by DC Labs and is released on Friday 3rd November 2023.