Mercy present: Electronic Voice Phenomena
A showcase of artists mimicking and manipulating electronic processing in vocal performance.
Part of Mercy's Overlap programme exploring shared territory across music/writing/performance, this event features a premiere of a new work by former Poet in Residence at the Bluecoat, Nathan Jones with Tom Rea Smith, plus Tuvian throat singer Soriah, Holly Pester colluding in the uncanny valley, Mark Leahy operating between digital and analogue to generate song lyrics and looping rhythmic texts, and Emma Bennett talking like a bird talking about a bird.
New possibilities in spoken word for the finale of this year's C&V festival.
Supported by Arts Council England
8.30pm, Sunday 16th October, at the Bluecoat, tickets £5
DETAILS
featuring NEW COMMISSION from Nathan Jones with Tom Rea Smith
The romantic lyric is revisited, manifest with the perversions, disruptions and glitches of modern practice, in this deeply affective and synaesthetic performance work.
this work is supported by Ronald Duncan Literary Foundation
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MARK LEAHY
artist operating among textual practices and live art. Mark's poetry sequence 'Swatches' was published by Acts of Language (2009), and he presented live works in Live Art Falmouth (2008) and Performance Market (Plymouth, 2010). His vocal work uses repetition and restrictions to explore affect in language. Looping structures, rhythms, and lyrical allusions play with distinctions between analogue and digital, between the body and its representations or mediations. For EVP, he is developing a set of short songs that deal with friendship, sex, and the edges between culture and nature.
HOLLY PESTER
an experimental sound poet and writer, undergoing PhD research at Birberk in 'Speech and the Archive in Intermedia Poetry'. Her performance texts are experiments in the sound and shape of speech, blending pre-verbal noises with semantic surrealism in an investigation into language transmission. Holly's work creates a tension between "natural" speech and linguistic eloquence, creating a flux of meaning. In her performance, sound and page work he uses humour to evoke the wonderful irregularities of language. At EVP, Holly will be exploring the performative element of her installation work The Uncanny Valley
EMMA BENNETT
performance maker and artist. Her work explores the physicality of speech and the strange complexities of language. Each of her performances is built on an act of grappling - be it with difficult words or unwieldy objects. Mercy have commissioned Emma to expand on her work 'talking like a bird talking about a bird'.
SORIAH
Portland musician and ritual artist Soriah draws equally from performance and musical traditions both modern and ancient-raga, shamanism, the revisionist arts of electroacoustics, noise, butoh, and free improvisation. One element which pervasively informs his work, is traditional Tuvan throat singing. He was honored as the "Best Foreigner" in the 2008 Ustuu-Khooree World Music Festival in Tuva, where the form originated. Through costume, movement and meditation Soriah evokes an otherworld of profound mystical import.