I’ll be upgrading the TA website over the next couple of days so expect erratic behaviour….

Spanky newness here soon!

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Just a quick post to show you another live video, this time from Derbylicious back in July. Derbylicious was the official launch of Blue Mountains Roller Derby League (my team, yeah! )

Sound on the video is lo-fi, but hey, who cares?!

Also at the launch, we aired a league promo edited by yours truly….

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I’ve been hibernating this winter finishing up my thesis, only venturing out for coffee, performing, and roller derby training. A girl has to have her priorities!

One of my recent adventures was performing a TA set @ Hardware Gallery, Enmore for Sound Series #15.
I was in illustrious company, with Forenzics and Toy Death being on the bill as well. Forenzics did a great improv set in the style of Godspeed You! Black Emperor which is impressive because they are only a handfull of guys who make a great big sound. Not surprisingly, Toy Death rocked the house!

The TA set included a little improv too. This was a soundscape from The Pomegranate Cycle intended for dancer, but I added vocals instead (nobody wants to see my interpretive dance ).

And here is a live version of “Of Hymn” off The Pomegranate EP:

And finally some pictures from the show:

[Show as slideshow]

Enjoy!

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Details are:

Sound Series #15

Sound Series is a monthly evening of sound-based performance and installation.

#15 will feature:

Toydeath

Textile Audio

Forenzics

Secrets

+ second last day of Lucien Alperstein’s photography exhibition ‘Water and Music.’

http://www.toydeath.com/To​ydeath.html
http://www.textileaudio.co​m/
http://www.forenzics.net/
http://secrets4eva.bandcam​p.com/
http://www.lucienalperstei​n.com/
http://iamlucien.wordpress​.com/

Time:  Friday, July 22 · 7:30pm – 11:00pm

Location: Hardware Gallery, 263 Enmore Rd, Enmore NSW.

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And to keep you entertained until then check out the enchanting ice music by Terje Isungset who recently visited ANU:

Makes me want to move somewhere with even more snow!

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Just a quick note to say I’ll be singing the alto part in a concert of early music this coming friday at St Peter’s Anglican Church, Cremorne.

Program will include pieces by Victoria, Palestrina. I’ll be joined by soprano Michaela Leisk, tenor Warren Fisher, and bass David Hidden.

Address is: 29 Waters Road, Cremorne.

Come and meet my Mum.

(Only kidding, but you can if you want to!

In other news, I’ve been mixing down a lot of pieces from The Pomegranate Cycle opera which haven’t made it into an official release yet. Things aren’t quite ready to be shared, but it shouldn’t be long. V. excited.

Happy Easter to y’all!

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I always think of Hymn as being a fragile song, there is something breakable about it. Strangely, the addition of noise and other artifacts seems to accentuate the fragility, but still leaves the song whole…

Questions and comments posted below or contact Rsdio directly.

Enjoy!!

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When Opera Australia premiered Batavia in 2001, it caused controversy because one of the female characters, Lucretia Jansz, is raped on stage in an extended sequence. Sitting in the audience was traumatic, perhaps because of the realism brought to the performance by soprano Anke Höppner who played Lucretia. Batavia was true to operatic form, as for the most part, opera has a series of events unfold for the audience directly, and/ or in sequence. The action is perceived as concrete.

The composition and narrative style of Pomegranate Cycle is much more abstract. Action is alluded to, and hopefully, felt as a mood rather than a logical sequence. This was a necessity of form, given that Pomegranate was always intended to be realised by one or two people. For Pomegranate’s premiere it ended up being two performers: myself as singer, and dancer Liz Evans. We were sharing the two main characters of Kore/ Persephone, and Demeter while also stepping into the narrator and chorus p.o.v. at times as well. Truth be told, Liz ended up embodying Persephone more than I did, and I ended up accenting Demeter to a greater degree, but always it was in flux. Complex and tangled. As it should be really because Kore / Persephone/ Demeter are sometimes considered different embodiments of the same women, representing different points of the life cycle. Complex much…?  ;)

How to write and perform the act of rape in a performance so that it is recognised and felt by the audience without subsuming the tone of the rest of the opera? My intention was to write a work which ultimately leads to healing for both the characters, and the audience. This was a delicate thing.

Musically I didn’t want to write a formal vocal part for this scene. Setting it down as notes on a stave seemed wrong some how. I wanted to convey the impact of violence, not its cause: the cracking of beautiful and fragile parts of the self, and the rawness which is exposed. Sonically the physical violence became a sense of tearing and the emotional violence one of cracking. So I gathered papers, fabrics and plastics and recorded them being torn at close range. Loud sound sources right next to cardioid microphones can produce a grainy, boomy distortion in recordings so I used this to make the ripping sounds feel close and uncomfortable. I found samples of eggs being cracked and used those too. In contrast to the dry ripping recordings, the egg sounds are wet, and unnervingly familiar. Then I mixed, processed and built sound layers. Through this, I wove a granulated, ruined, version of the aria sung by Kore at the beginning of the opera, Of Hymn. In Hymn, she is beautiful and whole, in Ripping she is pulled apart, so it made thematic sense to pull apart her music.

In the stage performances of Pomegranate Cycle last year,  I stepped out of that scene entirely. Liz, and our director, Narelle Yeo worked on the scene as a movement piece. The audience sees Kore, scared, reacting to a terror which has no form. It could be the act of violence, or it could be a memory of it. The perpetrator is removed, but his presence if felt all the more for it. Rather than write about it, here is the video:

 

This year I wanted to see how I could perform Ripping in my regular gigs. As much as I’d like too, I can’t take Liz with me everywhere! I thought I’d try and translate the feeling behind Liz’s movement into a vocal improvisation, keeping the intent behind her performance, and allowing it to be responsive and free. There are no intelligible words, how can there be in a moment where violence is experienced? Lisa Gerrard has embodied this “language from non-language” in her work to wonderful e/affect and hopefully here, it was able to express a little of what is felt in these dark moments that lie beyond what we can fully comprehend.

Here is the Ripping improv, performed live at Refraction in March:

I’d love to know your thoughts on the translation of this mood from dance to voice. Post any thoughts below or drop me an email to textileaudio A-T gmail.com.

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If you like the track, Hymn was released last year on The Pomegranate EP. CDs & digital downloads are available from the Bandcamp site, or if your mood swings towards iTunes, it has just become available there too!

More video soon.

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Footage was from the Florida Memory Project. A great example of why Commons projects for public material are so important.

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