Narrow Backroads is a collaborative project by Acoustic Heritage Collective developed from a journey to Japan and the gradual transformation of that journey into sound, memory and spatial narrative. Inspired by Matsuo Bashō’s Oku no Hosomichi - The Narrow Road to the Deep North - the project takes the idea of travel not only as geographical movement, but as a process through which perception, memory and imagination reshape the experience of place.

The work began with a two-week trip to Japan, during which sounds, images, writings and impressions were collected as raw materials for a collective composition. Rather than treating these materials as documentary records of a route, the project approached them as fragments of an inner and shared landscape: traces of places encountered, remembered, displaced and reassembled through listening. The journey became less a linear itinerary than an acoustic and perceptual diary, where external landscapes opened into internal geographies.

As the project evolved through working sessions in Barcelona and Berlin, these materials were transformed into an immersive composition. Field recordings, voices, spatial sound, visual elements and poetic narration were brought together to construct a listening environment in which memory does not simply recall a place, but actively produces space. In this sense, Narrow Backroads is concerned with how sound can create relations between travel and recollection, landscape and imagination, physical movement and mental projection.

My role in the project involved co-direction and spatial sound design. The spatialisation process was central to the work’s dramaturgy: sound was not used only to surround the audience, but to articulate distance, proximity, displacement and temporal transformation. Through spatial audio, the composition creates a shifting field in which memories, locations and narrative fragments appear, recede, overlap and return.

The final work reflects the collective process from which it emerged. It moves between acoustic diary, immersive narrative and performative composition, using spatial sound to explore how places continue to exist after being travelled through - not as stable images, but as resonant formations shaped by memory, perception and technological mediation.

Narrow Backroads premiered in November 2024 at Antic Teatre in Barcelona, within INFLUX, a festival dedicated to audiovisual performing arts. The work was presented as a film with live sound performance, bringing the composition into a real-time performative format. It was produced by Acoustic Heritage Collective with the support of Barcelona Crea, the Goethe-Institut and the Generalitat de Catalunya.