Trepanner

an ongoing field study

Trepanner is a sound and image project exploring what it means to be human — recorded in real caves, built from distorted guitar and spatial audio, staged as site-specific ritual as much as gig.

Field Notes — 01

Cave art, opened up

Trepanner began as a question: what did it sound like, the first time someone made a mark in the dark and meant something by it? The project pairs research into prehistoric cave art with heavy, melodic, distorted music — ambient in its patience, metal in its weight.

Working alongside archaeologists and acousticians, recordings are made inside real caves — chasing resonance, drip, and the strange way sound behaves underground — then rebuilt in the studio with layered guitars, spatial audio, and tools usually reserved for the stage: TouchDesigner, Blender, custom speaker arrays.

The name refers to trepanation — the ancient, brutal practice of opening the skull to let something out, or in. It’s the closest word we have for what this music is trying to do.

IMAGE — RECORDING SESSION

SITE 04 — LIMESTONE CHAMBER

18Hz resonance measured at chamber mouth. Used as the bed for the second movement.

SITE 09 — DEEP GALLERY

Ochre pigment sample, hand stencil. Referenced in the title mark.

SITE 12 — RESONANT SHAFT

Natural reverb tail: 6.2 seconds. Recreated in the live rig via convolution.

Field Notes — 02

Pigment

A listening descent into Creswell Crags. Headphones, a dark room, and your hands.

Pigment takes a choir recorded inside the caves at Creswell Crags and hands it to you as raw material. Your fingers move through the recording rather than over a timeline — one finger opens a voice, a second becomes a filter riding the whole space, and the speed of your hand decides whether the cave whispers or floods.

Nothing is pitched out of key: grains move in locked octaves, so the choir stays a choir. What changes is space — reverb, delay, and the slow descent that darkens the whole piece the longer you stay down there.

It loads once and then needs nothing. No signal, no connection, no wifi — built to be played standing inside the cave it came from.

Enter Pigment
DURATION
as long as you keep your hands down
REQUIRES
headphones · touch or mouse
CONNECTION
first load only — then fully offline

Field Notes — 03

Deep Time

An atlas of Ice Age art. Sixty-nine sites, and the ice moving over them across twenty-eight thousand years.

Deep Time maps sixty-nine archaeological sites — painted caves, engraved plaquettes, carved figurines — against the Eurasian ice sheets as they grind toward the glacial maximum and retreat again. Drag the timeline and the ice moves; each site surfaces as it enters its dated range and goes dark as it leaves.

Every site carries a note. Pitch comes from latitude, so the north sings higher. Cave art is a struck bell, portable art a music-box pluck an octave up, and a site holding both is a bowed swell an octave down. Press RUN and the whole timeline plays as a melody — a crowded millennium arpeggiates rather than landing as one chord.

Forty-nine of the sixty-nine records have been checked against published sources; the rest say provisional on their own card, because being honest about what is not yet verified is part of the work. The ice comes from DATED-1, the portable art from SignBase — both published, both credited in the footer.

Open the atlas
SITES
69 mapped · 49 verified
SPAN
38,000 — 10,000 BP
REQUIRES
sound on · drag, scroll, scrub

Field Notes — 04

Film

Renders, captures, and processed footage from the Blender and TouchDesigner side of the project — the visual language behind the music and the live rig.

VIDEO — PASTE A VIMEO OR YOUTUBE LINK INTO content.js

Field Notes — 06

Live & Installations

Trepanner is built to leave the browser: site-specific performances in caves, quarries, and other resonant spaces, using spatial audio and experimental speaker arrays designed in TouchDesigner.

IMAGE

Chamber Sessions I

Undisclosed limestone cave system, UK — TBA

A single-audience-capacity performance using a custom eight-channel speaker rig built into the cave geometry.

IMAGE

Trepanner: Installation

Gallery space, TBA — TBA

A darkened room, ambisonic playback, and slow-moving projected cave imagery generated in Blender.

Field Notes — 08

Get in touch

For bookings, site-specific performance proposals, press, or collaboration.

hello@trepanner.art