swinging & pushing one, voice & microphone, 2005

swinging & pushing two, voice & microphone, 2005

birdie, voice, banjo, analog & digital synth., 2005

flailing (failing), banjo and microphone, 2004

Swinging and Pushing

The voice is the deliverer of the sounds that connect to communication, my interest was to approach it as another physical component of the body that reveals inner complexities. Bodies not only contain physical limits but are surrounded by invisible borders. Opening up the throat as wide as one can is completely appropriate if one is learning to sing properly, but being loud mouthed or a slut is generally a problem.

Through practice, I became familiar with the microphone and recording the voice. I discovered many perimeters to work with. I did a series of recorded performances based on swinging microphones, vocal tones, and the length and strength of voice and breath. These tracks were then mixed and edited into two sound pieces.

What happens at the end of breath and sound? A desperate place is reached when the body can’t go on without breathing. The solidness of the tone in the beginning of the breath is reduced in the end to noises more familiar with crying or laughing. This desperation can be a metaphor for voices in general and the complication of being heard but misunderstood.

Birdie

I grew up within an environment that was heavy with folksiness – music, canning things, having an outhouse, clutter and filth in the yard – looking back on it I realize it was and still is existing in this place that goes in and out of reality and romanticism.

My work exists in this place too.

Folk songs are stories set to tunes that flow in and out of regions and lives, changing slightly or a lot from version to version. They no longer can be claimed by authorship. The sounds that carry the words are based on emotions and actions that have become romantic icons of American individualism: yearning, sadness, redemption, sacrifice, vengeance, love and loss. The tones and sounds of these ideas became a place of interest. Why is tragedy and sadness romanticized? Can tradegy be anything but romantic?

These questions led to feeble attempts at understanding and learning this music through my own methods. I would record tracks (both vocal and instrumental) that were my own interpretations of songs and then digitally process and re-arrange these recordings to create the finished piece.

Birdie is put together from two recorded tracks of vocals and the banjo. They were processed separately by using an analog synthesizer and computer. The banjo sounds become electrified, squished, distorted with synthesis but still retain the remainders of sadness. The vocals were rearranged through the digital process of granular synthesis, re-placing comprehensible words and phrases that were once linear and narrative with vocals that no longer recognizable as words but sounds of yearning. Repetition, a strong structural element within folksongs is used. Repetition finds itself through out all my work and is also a reference to the repetitions of life – breathing, eating, shitting and making the same mistakes over and over.