Bioluminescence
performance project with Lesley Flanigan, 2006-present
I have been performing since 2006 in a duet with vocalist Lesley Flanigan. The project, dubbed Bioluminescence, consists of a performance between Flanigan and myself. Meditating on the female voice, the project consists of improvisations between the live singer and a bank of samples captured in situ during the performance, which can be transposed, re-arranged, and stretched by myself at the computer. Real-time visualizations of the sound are projected overhead. Our artist statement, in part reads:
The voice has a unique role in our musical culture, bridging the linguistic and the semiotic in a way that transcends instrumentality through a highly personal embodiment of musicianship. The recorded female voice, in particular, has been the subject of academic investigation following its role in aesthetics (Adorno), cinema and psychology (Silverman) and feminist theory (De Laurentis). In electroacoustic music, the voice has a privileged place in our canon, providing an boundless source of material for sonic exploration from the tape works of Berio, Dodge, and Lansky through the composer- performer repertoire of Joan LaBarbera and Pamela Z. Our collaboration centers around an extensive investigation of the possibilities of the improvised voice in tandem with electroacoustic processing, focusing on the possibilities of detemporalization and memory evoked through the use of looping, time-stretching, and spectral processing. The interplay between the two performers (one singing, one processing) takes the metaphor of the voice as impulse and the computer as filter and creates a dense palette of evocative sounds and images derived entirely from the voice of the singer.
The project runs on custom software that I’ve written that allows me to use the laptop as a live sampler to capture Flanigan’s voice into “banks” of four short phrases each, which can be triggered in any sequence at variable speed and pitch, entirely by typing on the computer keyboard. In performance, this allows us to perform entire pieces while maintaining eye contact, creating the illusion of an intimate conversation between two people.
Over the last five years Bioluminescence has been performed at the Stone and Roulette in New York City, at Brown University’s Granoff Arts Center, and as a keynote performance at the CHI conference at Georgia Tech.
