The Dante Loop

Sophie Cooper's 'The Dante Loop' was originally recorded as a series of surround sound installations for John Ryland's Library in Manchester and inspired by Dante's 'The Divine Comedy'. 'Designed as a site-specific immersion of sound in another almost otherworldly space, that of the neo-Gothic John Rylands Library in Manchester. Using electroacoustic and multi-channel methods which bring together field recordings, choral singing, and new composition, all intricately looped, sequenced and glitched, the three movements of the Dante Loop relocate Dante’s three afterlife realms to twenty-first century Manchester. Listeners begin their journey in the Inferno, located in the historic entrance, the lowest, darkest, part of the library; they progress together up the light-filled staircase to the upper story, echoing the souls moving slowly up through the terraces of Purgatory, and complete their journey in Paradiso, the light-filled historic reading room, the highest point of the building and the place in which all knowledge is venerated in a vast and spectacular space. Here, at the culmination of the piece, the circularity of the harmonium drones and the sound of the pages of a 500-year-old copy of the Divine Comedy, move steadily around the reading room, and place the poem at the centre of the library’s universe.' Dr Guyda Armstrong