Friday 21 October 2011

live at Seeing in the Dark

live at Seeing in the Dark by Steven Ball
Soundtracks performed to Vowels & Consonants by Lynn Loo & Guy Sherwin and Autumn Fog by Lynn Loo, recorded live at Seeing in the Dark, CIRCA, Newcastle Upon Tyne, 19 October 2011.

The Vowels & Consonants soundtrack replays and manipulates samples of Bob Cobbing reading with additional live utterances. Autumn Fog is based on a recording of my back yard (the leaves in the film were shot in Lynn's backyard), with spoken quotidian observation.

"...Vowels and Consonants consists of six projected loops in which individual letters appear intermittently crawling up and across the surface of the screen, occasionally intruding into the optical sound area, thus emitting gentle plops of sound which seem to emulate the sound of the letters. As in other optical sound works the relationship between image and sound is integral: while the use of letters suggests a literal ‘reading’ it also resembles ‘concrete’ text such as Bob Cobbing used with Koncrete Kanticle, used as much to prompt vocal sounds in performance as to be read as conventional poetic text. As such the work becomes, like concrete or performance poetry, a score for itself. In fact, Loo and Sherwin have regularly extended the work with the addition of live sound and musical accompaniment, often local to the place of performance and, in this context, the projectors become instruments, part of an ensemble. "
Steven Ball, 'Conditions of Music: Contemporary Audio-Visual Spatial Performance Practice', Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (Tate Publications, 2011)

 

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