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A short drive away from Manchester is Dunham Massey, a 17th century National Trust property where a new soundscape installation will give audiences a unique experience of the cycle of life, nature and grief.

‘ORIGIN’ is the latest art installation from A Right / Left Project, Stephen Dobbie and Colin Nightingale’s soundscape collective. The pair met through Punchdrunk – where they are Creative Director and Associate Creative Producer, respectively – the innovative stage company that changed people’s perceptions of what was possible in immersive theatre through shows like ‘Sleep No More’ and ‘The Burnt City’.

With A Right / Left Project, Dobbie and Nightingale have expanded from working within the structures of immersive theatre to creating their own experiences from the ground up.

Together they’ve created bold works that break apart – sometimes literally – audience conceptions of what a sound installation can be. ‘Beyond the Road’ at London’s Saatchi Gallery in 2019 took the work of electronic musician UNKLE and created the first “walkthrough album”. Their next project, 2023’s ‘The Retiring Room’ was a sonic expedition in a hotel room that could only be experienced one person at a time.

Whether it’s in one of Punchdrunk’s expansive settings or their more intimate installations, both agree that sound is beyond essential in the experience. “An image can be as grainy or as distorted as you want, but people will not forgive bad sound,” Dobbie says, noting how films like The Blair Witch Project could get away with shaky cam footage because they’d pushed the budget on telling the story through audio.

“We used to joke that, essentially, as long as we had a building and we could get sound through it, we could literally switch the lights out and give someone a torch, and they’d have an experience,” Nightingale adds. “All the rest of it was actually just an additional bonus. Without the sound there’s nothing.”

For ‘ORIGIN’, Dobbie and Nightingale are back with one space. It’s a far cry from the elaborate Punchdrunk production of ‘Sleep No More’, which loosely followed the plot of ‘Macbeth’ as audience members independently traversed the many rooms of a hotel.

“We’ve been a part of some massive scale projects,” Nightingale says, “getting the right circumstances to allow those projects to happen is really tough.” From the pair’s interest in spatialized sound, “‘ORIGIN’ came out of us trying to scale down a little bit and explore what you could do in one room where there’s minimal intervention, but there would still be emotional impact.”

After people spend some time enjoying the 300-acre parkland around Dunham Mass where fallow deer run free, they’ll be able to enter the opulent house at the heart of the estate where ‘ORIGIN’ will be set up. In the room, audience members will lie down around a structure designed around the Himalayan Lily to experience the soundscape.

“We wanted to take an approach of cinematic sound and reimagine it in an environment where an audience is more static,” Dobbie says. Although everyone is in the same room hearing the same soundtrack, through the way they’ve spatialized the music, each experience will be unique. “You might get slightly more flute or slightly more violin. I think in animating the space like that, and animating the composition, it shifts the way you experience music.”

“It’s almost as though you’re experiencing music as you experience sound in quite a naturalistic way,” Dobbie adds.

A Right / Left Project first created ‘ORIGIN’ with the composer Toby Young and lighting design by Ben Donoghue. It was first unveiled last year at World Heart Beat in London’s Embassy Gardens before a stint at London Design Festival.

As it returns, now in Dunham Mass, the pair are still reticent about what ‘ORIGIN’ is actually about. “We all have our own relationships with births and deaths over the last couple of years and a lot of that thinking has gone into the work,” Nightingale will admit. “But that’s all we really want to say to people.”

The only true way to experience something is, after all, for oneself. It’s on the audience to find their own experiential narrative. While the music might occasionally play into “familiar tropes”, Dobbie says of its “dramatic swells”, there are also “breaks of sparse atmospheric sections”. All of these give the audience room to feel it as they wish.

“We’re trying to create a piece of music as an invitation to explore within yourself. To explore what might be going on in your head,” Dobbie suggests.

Anyone who’s seen Punchdrunk’s work such as the 2022 London show ‘The Burnt City’ will be familiar with the production company’s abrasive and in-your-face approach to immersion. They’ve never shied away from violence, nudity or gore. Yet, ‘ORIGIN’ represents a quieter and calmer side to the sound engineers’ artistic impulses.

“A lot of that work is coming from a place of taking people out of their comfort zone as a way to then engage them in an avant garde approach to theatre,” Nightingale says. Punchdrunk began at the cusp of the millennia, “where people were starting to get fractured information, but you were still kind of in control of how you received information.”

“Now we live in a world that’s just madness out there with so many truths,” Nightingale continues. “So we were interested in creating a sanctuary. It’s a sacred space where people actually listen to music and disconnect from the madness out there and maybe regulate their nervous systems a little bit.”

‘ORIGIN’ will be at Dunham Massey, Cheshire from 3 May to 2 November.