For those PAN readers – photo editors, picture buyers, photographers and photo agency staff – wanting to rest their eyes and open their ears this new immersive sound work located in a beautiful London chapel by composer and sound artist Pete M. Wyer will be a delight!
About the event: This July, the Fitzrovia Chapel presents a haunting new immersive sound installation by composer and sound artist Pete M. Wyer. A Map of the Invisible, created while Wyer was living in Venice, invites audiences to step inside sound and reflect on the unseen worlds that surround us. The result is a deeply moving encounter shaped by faith, care, suffering and beauty.
Drawing on this legacy, Wyer has composed nine new vocal works for a 16-speaker immersive sound system within the Chapel walls. The pieces are interwoven with field recordings captured across Venice – church bells, footsteps, lapping water, voices and distant streets – creating a richly textured sonic environment. Reflecting the Fitzrovia Chapel’s own history, the works draw on deeply personal testimonies of illness, recovery, grief and resilience, alongside accounts of paranormal experiences associated with the site, including stories from former Middlesex Hospital staff.
PAN sent freelance content researcher/producer Steve Bergson to the press preview (thanks for the invite Alison!) and this is what he heard:
Don’t listen now…
A Map of the Invisible
Venice has inspired so much memorable art from music to painting , novels and films that it can be difficult to see where the new angles might be found. British composer and sound artist Peter Wyer has created what might best be described as an experience, a recreation and interpretation of the watery city to immerse the audience in the unseen worlds in which we live. It uses a 16 speaker immersive sound system within the very contained Chapel walls.
An intensely ambitious undertaking then to evoke very personal feelings of care, loss and beauty within the framework of a city haunted by musical figures. But this is more than an experiment in audio composition and sound design. Wyer has set this sonic exploration in a setting which both echoes the San Marco cathedral but also resonates with its own powerful sense of the past. By installing multiple speakers around the Fitzrovia Chapel in Landon’s Noho area, a survivor of the redevelopment of the old Middlesex Hospital site which was originally built in homage to the original Basilica, the performance also plays with notions of hospital life – the medical miracles as well as the suffering.
It’s a complex context for some very varied music: much is choral making use of spatial separation to correspond to the separate choirs that sing in different galleries in San Marco to create a stirring polyphonic soundscape; others sound quite rock-influenced. The attempt to put quantum theory to music in the style of a traditional mass is very adventurous concept.
If this seems esoteric in concept, the reality is actually very visceral. The music powerfully reverberates around the Byzantine London chapel to very moving effect. But Wyer has gone one stage further. In wanting to tell very personal stories of illness, recovery, grief and the sense of the paranormal (the chapel is reputed to be haunted by the ghosts of dead hospital patients), he has sought a way to tie the elements together. The music is punctuated with very clear field recordings of the sound of the bells, streets and canals of Venice that contribute musical leavening to the main themes. But in one stage further, the composer has added his own narration of his reaction to the sonic phenomena of everyday life in Venice. What could sound intrusive and jarring, comes across in this moving poetic testimony as deeply personal evocations of an environment. It works.
This whole experience begins to approach a hybrid medium which is somewhere between the operatic and if it does not sound reductive, even the movie soundtrack. It can conjure pictures of the old London hospital life and the ghostly but still lively life on the streets and canals of Venice. The many layered effect is a powerful way of delving into the textual and visual dimensions while remaining essentially a sonic adventure. In the performance staged in the Fitzrovia Chapel, the beautiful setting supplies all the visuals you could need.
This map of the invisible is an exciting artistic enterprise, which certainly pushes boundaries and not just musical ones. Because it is quite unique in this setting, the worry is that it might not translate as well to more limited media. All the elements blend so well together, a video interpretation might be the only way even to try to replicate the resonance of this performance. It’s certainly invigorating to experience the expedition into new media forms in the setting of the remarkable Chapel which sets off the sense of place and the spirit of memory so vividly.
Steve Bergson for PAN.
A Map of the Invisible
A new immersive sound work by Pete M. Wyer
The Fitzrovia Chapel, Fitzroy Place, 2 Pearson Square, London, W1T 3BF
13 – 24 July 2026 | Admission free.