A collaborative sound art project celebrating the female revolutionary spirit. Co-curated by La Cosa Preziosa and Rachel Ní Chuinn
Get the album on Bandcamp here.
photo credit: Daryl Feehely
At every point in the universe, there exists a cosmic background radiation; a remnant from when the universe appeared out of nothing. This afterglow of the big bang appears not as light but as radio waves.
This is the point of departure for an improvised collaboration between light and sound. Renata Pekowska works with light and Rachel Ní Chuinn works with sound. For this performance, both artists are using key structural points that give equal weight to the sonic and the visual.
From “Some People are Frightened” by Don Mahony in the Journal of Music
Melancholy waltz
Earlier that evening, the Circus Factory venue witnessed some of the more distinctive performances of the weekend. Cloaked in tulle veils fastened by thread at the neck, druidic duo Salac were as heavy on the theatrical as they were sonically, delivering heavily distorted bass and serrated fuzz.
What a blessed relief then was sound artist Rachel Ní Chuinn. In a collaboration with light artist Renata Pekowska, Ní Chuinn’s improvised performance was easily the most satisfying and certainly the most intimate sounding of the weekend. Pekowska’s projections of distorted glimmers of light were centred around a revolving image that resembled a cell under the microscope; Ní Chuinn played low clarinet over the calm static of surface noise while gentle slow-release tones pinged like bubbles of gas reaching the brim. The melancholy waltz between sound and image married beautifully with the warehouse space located along Cork’s docklands.
Devised and performed live soundtrack to theatre show by Martin Sharry with video by Francis Matthews.
Small excerpt with the trailer here.
Devised and performed live electronics for this adventurous reworking of a classic by Joanna Crawley. Composition by Jane Deasy, produced by White Label
A collaborative project with comedian Kevin McAleer and theatre director Ciarán Taylor. This work-in-progress was shown at the Axis, Ballymun under the Fás & Forbairt scheme and was also supported by workshops as part of New Music Dublin in the National Concert Hall. The work is a language-mangle opera, where online translation and artificial intelligence meet language melodies and fruit choreography.
Based on the walking time of the Hoboken Sacred Harp Singing tradition. I took the audience and split them into four parts. Each part has two notes. On completing a circle they switch notes. As the parts circle each other, the nested orbits mean the chords gradually dissolve into each other with every step. The piece was first performed as part of a composer's concert produced by the ICC at the National Concert Hall. We performed the piece in the reverberant corridor outside the Kevin Barry room.
Working with artist Gillian Fitzpatrick to bring a live electronic music performance to her exhibition in the Goethe Institut, Dublin. Her sculptures became musical instruments in a tribute to the synthesizer sounds of Kraftwerk.
photo credit Gillian Fitzpatrick
An evening of ten pieces compiled for the Dublin Fringe Festival. The audience was placed at the centre surrounded by four-channel sound. A projector screened films on the ceiling in the first-half. Fall from Space was taken from NASA footage of Endeavour's launch pad crashing through the atmosphere. The original visuals and audio were so striking as to be best left unedited. The short excerpt was screened on the ceiling as the audience lay on the ground. During the interval, the audience were moved through the space to a performance involving hacked toys and domestic objects. In the second half the audience was asked to participate in a couple of the pieces including for Ish Tisi, a piece developed by myself and Jenn Kirby, which used Morse code to develop rhythms performed by the audience.
This performance was developed as part of a weeklong residency at the White Rabbit Arts Festival in Nova Scotia. The audience were led on a brisk mile walk through the forest to a clearing, where a short performance encouraged them to relive the sights and sounds of their immediate environment. The photograph is from my first time visiting the site, the performance took place at the height of summer.
The first Montreal magic sound box produced with members of CKUT local and community radio station. A dark curtained space was constructed around the audience with a quadraphonic set-up. A combination of live, acoustic and electronic sounds surrounded the audience in the dark. For the night, I developed a tape piece called Dialogue based on conversations with close friends. During the four-channel playback, myself and another member of CKUT, Andrea-Jane Cornell, raced in opposing circles around the audience.