RECORDINGS REBORN
In a world where we can cross the globe in a matter of hours and recapture the past at the touch of a button, this piece of Performance Art endeavours to enhance a sense of time and space and reconnect you with the journeying in between. The recordings featured were made solely on cassette tape over the last 3 decades. Moving forwards and backwards in time and space is represented by the ‘fast forwarding’ and ‘rewinding’ which is necessary to move from one part of the tape to another. The piece celebrates the exploration of this and the inspiring process of juxtaposing the recordings with live performances of music inspired by them. The interaction between these elements has resulted in the re-clothing of these historic musical memories with my own reflections from the present, the may pole symbolising these recordings reborn.
Tracks One and two- A father and daughter’s documentation of their flights to India, recorded 20 years apart
Track three- Sri ma anandamayiduring leading satsang with the children of her ashram in Varanasi recorded in 1996
Track four- ‘bhairav’- a morning rag arranged by Olivia preye 2011
Track five- anonymous and undated Gregorian chant recorded at ‘l’abbaye de solesmes’- a Benedictine abbey in 1989
Track six- A response to a found Gregorian chant by Olivia preye 2011
Track seven- A duet with a Namibian village’s church choir recorded in1981 and composed in 2011
Track eight- A rewound cannon of Once in Royal david’s city
Tracks nine, ten and eleven
-Once in royal david’s city live from Kings College Cambridge, Christmas eve1984
- Once in royal david’s city live from Kings College Cambridge, Christmas Eve1994
- Once in royal david’s city live from Kings College Cambridge, Christmas Eve 2004
Programme notes from first performance at Toynbee Hall, June 2011.
I came across my father's vast cassette tape collection. After hours of going through a life time of recordings from all over the globe, I noticed that I was most attracted to the choral music. I began to compose music in response to these recordings. In some there were gaps in the recordings which allowed me to compose music that filled in the gaps and over lapped, harmonising with them so that I could duet them. Here is an example- My duet with a Namibian church choir- here I sing with Goodbye Leopold and we weave our line in and out of the Church choirs singing- https://soundcloud.com/goodbyeleopold/namibian.
This process brought me closer to the source of these recordings, duetting with these 'ghosts' the other side of the world, brought them to life.
During the research process, I was constantly pressing 'Stop', 'Play', Rewind', 'Stop', 'play' etc. It felt unfamiliar as we live in a world where we simply need to press 'skip' on our mp3 players and we will be on the next track or we get on a plane and are in India in 5 hours without having prepared to adjust to a new environment, with no time for reflecting on leaving the environment we were just in. We no longer need to wait for the wheels to go round and round and are therefore loosing the ability to connect to a sense of journeying. It was this train of thought that inspired me to start learning songs in reverse. A long process which involves spending time connecting to a familiar piece of music in a completely new way and in that journey, finding hidden beauty. I felt that the process of interpreting my fathers field recordings recording in this way also helped give them new life.
I constructed a May Pole using cassette tape reel instead of coloured ribbon to symbolise the rebirth of these recordings and during the performance I walked backwards around the pole singing my compositions in reverse.
-Programme notes from first performance at toynbee Hall, june 2011