Pinnel at TUSK

I was delighted to experience Pinnel playing at the Sage on Friday night! Newcastle-based multi-disciplinary artist Lindsay Duncanson’s work “concerns people and space and how our relationship to landscape is mediated through culture and history; how we negotiate the sublime, the unimaginable, the beauty and fear of modern life”. 

Lindsay formed the Noizechoir experimental vocal group with partner Marek Gabrysch and they have since performed across the UK and Europe, including at TUSK Festival. 

The Noize Choir is a performance ensemble that was formed in 2011 by Newcastle based artists Lindsay Duncanson and Marek Gabrysch. It involves a loose collective of noise enthusiasts with a common desire to use the human voice free of the traditional restraints of typical choral settings, language or musical notation. Their work is based on a shared fascination with science, culture and landscape. They indulge in phenomenological explorations of museum collections, or imaginings of our geological past. Replicating and experimenting with the sound of machines or the natural world, Noize Choir continually find ways to push and pull the idea of what a choir can be. Noize Choir have composed and performed in French churches and on Austrian radio, at the Baltic Centre for contemporary arts, The Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle Upon Tyne, and the Grade II listed Preston Bus station.

http://www.noizechoir.net/

As an artist, she’s very interested in landscape and location and the human relationship to it. 

As Pinnel, Lindsay creates what she calls “vocal soundscapes” using live looping and her own voice, building compelling rhythms and rounds through little more than breath and punctuated utterances and creating an affect that’s as much machine-like as human.

http://www.productofboy.net/pinnel.htm

Vocal work with Sarah Grundy and her loop pedal

In addition to working with the Drone Ensemble on some audio to my forthcoming exhibition at The Word, I am collaborating with Sarah Grundy. Sarah is an interdisciplinary artist who works in sound, performance, theatre, and music. The majority of her work looks to worldmaking – creating an idealised alternative for living in or dealing with society. She is also part of ‘The Anima Collective’ who explore the potential of the voice through singing. Sarah also performs with Edwin Li as Leroy McSex in the musical, drag duo Shirley Mann and Leroy McSex.

Sarah and I had spoken about the work a few weeks ago, and we both agreed that using the loop pedal with Sarah's voice could be a good way to achieve the layering of voices that I want to create. When we met today I gave her a sheet with words on that she could use to play around with.

In her usual remarkable way, she soon began to thread words together and create some rhythmic patterns and harmonies, exemplified through the use of the loop pedal. We made a great start, and are to continue with developing this piece.

Circus Between Worlds introduces Deanna Smith

I will be one of the performers in Deanna's contribution to Circus Between Worlds. The rehearsals are proving to be very amusing and rather strange!

Deanna's live vocal performance will consist of a group of individuals appropriating noises associated or created through circus acts. Think dada poetry, think strangeness.



Deanna Smith is currently studying undergraduate Fine Art at Newcastle University. She is a mixed media artist, working predominately with sound and performance. Her work is concerned with societal power relations, using the voice as a metaphor for this.

It will be alright setup in Project Space

Recently I have been working on a sound piece called It will be alright. It features my voice and consists of 6 vocal tracks that are layered over each other. A few short sentences are repeated throughout, but the tone and volume of the voice varies.

Over the past few days I have been working in the project space to try different set ups of the installation. I used 4 speakers and connected these to a sound card which was connected to my laptop. There were 6 channels going into the speakers, so 2 of the speakers had 2 voices at once.

Working in the space, I edited the audio so that the audio came from different directions. I made stands for the speakers to be placed on so that the sound comes from head height as opposed to the floor or the room in general. I composed the sound to produce tension between the speakers, rather like two voices were arguing with each other from different side of the room. My intention is that the audience are surrounded by the sound, and immersed in the situation. In order to minimise the distractions and focus attention on the audio, the blinds were drawn so as to make the room as dark as possible.

Following my crit on Tuesday, I made a few changes to the audio (removing a few of the phrases from the work, adding more pauses etc), and then invited people to come to listen to the work on Wednesday. 

It is important to me that the audience listen to the whole of the work, as opposed to being able to enter at any point and leave before the end. I therefore chose not to show it on a loop, but instead allowed the viewer/s into the space, told them the work would last about 6 minutes and that I would leave and close the door. 

I waited outside the space until the audio had ended, and then opened the door, allowing the viewer to leave. 

I talked to many people about the work once they had experienced it, and received some very useful and positive responses. 

It became obvious that the work has a powerful impact, and in a couple of circumstances, people were moved to tears.

I want to make a few adjustments to the setup of the installation, such as finding a way to hide the speakers, the laptop and equipment. People commented that the light from the devices was off-putting, and that the speakers had too much of a presence in the space, and became like figures due to their height. In order to overcome these issues, I would need to build a darkened room, and position the speakers and equipment behind the walls.

I am considering whether there should be a limit to the number of people who can experience the work at the same time. One of the people who was brought to tears by the work told me afterwards that she would not have been able to respond so emotionally if there had been another person in the room with her.

                                                                                                                         

Sound recording in a proper studio!

I've recently been doing some vocal recording and I've been learning how to use an audio editing programme. It's been hard to find anywhere in the Fine Art building that is quiet enough for recording, and so I booked to use a sound room in the music department at the University. I expected to simply get a quiet booth, but was surprised to find out that it was a proper recording studio with one room which contained the microphones and an adjacent room separated by a glass window which contained the computer recording equipment. 

The wonderful Dave even helped provide some technical support! It was a rather surreal experience, but once I adapted to the situation, the recording went well and I am hopeful that I have some good quality footage to edit.