FALLING, IN TERMS OF SILENT (2015-2020) combines foley & sound design with the immediacy of live soundtrack creation, teasing out alternative narratives for a looping video image (from Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 1975).

The sounds I perform are layered, remixed and dismantled live, in collaboration with a software patch written for the work. As individual layers slip out of sync and drop away I add new sounds to reinterpret the underlying narrative. The soundscape is unique to each iteration and to the acoustics of each space.

The work is designed to sustain tension between improvisation and repetition, focusing on a small set of actions for an expanded sense of time. Like much of my recent work this is a feminist engagement with a character whose seemingly routine actions—in this case, laying a table—also provides a structure for thinking about what is produced in the gaps between sound and image, and about the uncertainty of narrative. This is a set of thoughts about space or empathy, about the life of the unseen or unknowable, and the ebb and flow of sync.

& See a video about the performance: https://vimeo.com/268619819.

& Hear an audio-only excerpt from one performance (HERE), at about the halfway point of a 30-minute version of the work. In this version I incorporated the speaker feedback in a controlled manner.