Into the Sound World : Worlding and the Thick Event in Neil Campbell and Seán Street’s Colaborative Album Estuary

put on as a live event during the annual, month-long Writing on the Wall festival in Liverpool. 1 It featured Campbell on classical guitar and Sen Street on spoken word, with Street sometimes offering paratextual interventions between the pieces.The performance took place in the performance space of Prohibition Recording Studios, a space which is both makeshift and thoughtfully tended.The walls are covered with recycled wooden boards, creating a warm acoustic environment.Clearly visible pipes and cables, as well as offices adjacent to the corridor that leads to the performance space, show that this is also a working environment.A small bar in the back of the room invites social interactions.The furnishings -folding tables and chairs, fairy lights and light chains -suggest that the studios can be easily converted into a different type of space for a different use, thus conveying an atmosphere of creative dynamism, work-in-progress and the possibility of transformation.There are no windows and therefore, no outside sonic interference, so that the space enables concentration, focus and attunement.Performers and listeners alike were immersed in the sound world that emerged from the interplay of spoken word, conversational intervention, and music.I grew to realize that I experienced that evening the gradual transformation of a guided journey into a sound world in the form of a performance, into what Nina Sun Eidsheim in Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice conceptualizes as a "thick event": an event that is multisensorial and dynamic; that is interpersonal and intermaterial; and that cannot be appreciated or understood by dissecting it into it singular, separate facets or referents (Eidsheim 2015, 2-3).Eidsheim's study, and the emerging interdisciplinary field around vibrations and vibrational listening, offers a promising approach to intermedial collaborations that comprise musical, poetic, social and spatial facets, such as Campbell and Street's previous collaborative project, Estuary.Here, the two artists created a piece that responds to, and emerges from within their perception of, the spatial, ecological and sensorial complexity of estuaries as thick events.Eidesheim begins Sensing Sound with a reflection on an occurrence in an ecologically and perceptually complex space: the falling of a tree in a forest (2015, 1).She defines this as a thick event because it involves a myriad of phenomena and therefore, a myriad of forms of perception.Such complexity, Eidesheim argues, must not be reduced to a singular sensory mode when we try to understand the event (2015, 4).However, modes of understanding that are channeled through academic 1 The organization Writing on the Wall emerged from the Liverpool Dockers Strike in the late 1990s.This was an industrial dispute which involved the lock-out of around 500 unionized workers employed by Mersey Docks, who had refused to cross a picket line set up by fellow workers who had been sacked by another company.Such solidarity actions are illegal under British (anti-) trade union legislation brought in by the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher and John Major.While the lock-out was the spark that lit the fuse, the issues at stake went deeper and involved the casualization of labor and the social and political impact of changes in the shipping industry, such as container shipping.Writing on the Wall is now a community organization that promotes writing as a community activity.See https://writingonthewall.org.uk/about/disciplines encourage such reductivism.The thick event is dissected into -usually, quantifiablecomponents by representatives of these disciplines, who then lay claim to offering an adequate understanding of each of these components, thus suggesting that a thick event can be accessed through only one of its components, and that each can be understood without considering the others.According to Eidesheim, this approach is not appropriate for a thick event.She makes this argument with regards to music; however, she quotes poet Billy Collins who identifies an analogous process in the study and reception of poetry, and she suggests that music and poetry, and the approaches they have been subjected to, are comparable.Moreover, she argues that "the way we conceive of our relationship to music could productively be understood as an expression of how we conceive of our relationship to the world" (2015, 6).This analogy between our relationship to music (and poetry) and our relationship to the world drives Estuary: Campbell and Street are themselves immersed listeners to the thick event that is the estuary, and they then create through poetry and music an analogous thick event in the form of a performance (live or recorded), into which listeners are invited to immerse during the process of listening.Yet, Estuary reaches beyond the collaborative piece or performance.On a conceptual and analytical level Estuary offers an excellent opportunity to bring together the register of music and sound study through the concept of the "thick event", and the register of ecopoetry 2 and New Materialism through the concept of worlding."Worlding" is an activity as well as a concept.It responds to the awareness that all beings and all matter are entangled with each other and that a "world" is not an external object, but an active process in which we as humans always participate, as "we come to know and enact a world from inhabiting it, from becoming attuned to its differences, positions and juxtapositions, from a training of our senses, dispositions and expectations and from being able to initiate, imitate and elaborate skilled lines of action" (Anderson and Harrison 2010, 9).The creation of a performance of the thick event that is an estuary participates in a worlding, and the performers extend this opportunity to Estuary's listeners and invite them into the event.Campbell and Street both have wide-ranging and pluralistic creative trajectories.Campbell is a performer, composer and producer.His repertoire as an acoustic classical guitarist and multi-instrumentalist spans a variety of musical styles, including contemporary classical music, Irish traditional and contemporary folk music, prog rock, and jazz, and he collaborates regularly with other artists.His compositions include several musical responses to works of literature, among them Frankenstein (2009) and The Smoky God (2024).Recently he has focused on production, and when reflecting on his work he devotes significant time and attention to the ways in which music and sounds affect listeners and how sensorial experiences can be encouraged, achieved and nurtured through composition and production.Campbell is also involved