Suchergebnisse

Chapter in forthcoming 'Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art' Introduction The voice is produced and shaped by a body. When heard, it also suggests a body. This tension between the relationship of the voice and the body has been a productive force in the creation of a variety of works within sound arts. In previous publications I have investigated how women sound artists have used voice, both literally and metaphorically, in their work to challenge contemporary historical and contemporary cultural assumptions about women's voices and the male normative within sound arts practice (Lane 2016). This was ignited by research into gender differences in the work produced by students of Sound Arts and Design at London College of Communication, a significant finding of which was that many female students used spoken voice in their work. Through an investigation of some of the ways that women's voices have been demonized and ridiculed within the public sphere and the analysis of how voice was being used in works by sound artists Hildegard Westerkamp, Janet Cardiff, and Jasmeen Patheja the paper went on to conclude that "The act of using one's own voice and language in one's own way is a radical move within electroacoustic music and sound art and women sound artists use voices, their own and others, in ways that subvert commonly held historic, socio-cultural prejudices against the existence of women's voices in public spaces. (Lane 2016, 109) In subsequent presentations (Lane 2017) this research has been extended and developed to consider some of the mechanisms by which some voices have been excluded from the sound arts canon through an uncritical acceptance of what Jennifer Stoever-Ackermann has termed our "raced, gendered, and historicized 'listening ears'" (Stoever-Ackerman 2010) accompanied by an obedience to normative notions of attentive and "expert" listening. In recent work this has been further developed by investigating the ways that the separation of the voice from the body has offered ways of silencing women in the public sphere through likening them to animals, and also allowed artists such as Laurie Anderson to play with creating new persona through manipulation of the voice (Lane 2018). Examining works by a variety of contemporary artists who work primarily with sound, this chapter aims to look at how the voice and voiced sounds, such as audible breathing and other nonlinguistic utterances, are used to both express and investigate notions of intimacy and their relation to gender. I have chosen to group the works together according to the category of sound used in the work, namely the sounds of female sexual pleasure, breath, and voice. In each case, these sounds are used by the artists to explore or express significantly different aspects of intimate experience and their relationship to notions of public, private, and political. Of course the works share aspects in common that transcend the choice of sounding material and where possible these will be discussed in relation to each other. Artists whose works are discussed include: Anna Raimondo, Yashas Shetty, Annea Lockwood, Khaled Kaddal, Ansuman Biswas, Ain Bailey, Hildegarde Westerkamp, Tomoko Hojo, Viv Corringham and Mikhael Karikis.

In January 1987 I left London and, travelled, under cover of night, across the Sudanese border into Tigray province, Northern Ethiopia on a convoy of lorries carrying food and other essentials. This area of North West Tigray was under control of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF) in dispute with the Derg, the Ethiopian Government, the most heavily armed regime in Africa, headed by Colonel Mengistu and backed by Soviet Russia. We were, at the invitation of the cultural troupes of the TPLF, an arm of the propaganda bureau, joining them at a specially convened music school, housed in a series of makeshift huts in the remote Kaza valley. For six months the cultural troupes ceased all but the most important of performances while they learnt to notate their music; arrange traditional Tigrayan music for modern electric instruments and to record and produce their work. That these activities were so prioritised by the TPLF is evidence of the importance of music, dance and drama in the liberation struggle for Tigray and the fight for the hearts and minds of the people. In 2019 we returned to Tigray and met up with some of pour former students to find out what had happened to both the liberation struggle and the legacy of the Gureza music school. This audio essay with accompanying text and photographs explores the historic need to modernise the traditional Ethiopian music that the TPLF cultural troupes were drawing on as well as the methods and legacy of that work.

Audio essay which tells the story of my time working with fighters from the cultural troupes of the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front or TPLF in the liberated areas of Tigray, Northern Ethiopia in 1987. These solders - all musicians, and performers - were fighting the Ethiopian government, the Derg, the most heavily armed regime in Africa at that time, and, as part of their battle for hearts and minds wanted to learn to notate traditional Tigrayan music, arrange it for modern electronic instruments and learn to record and amplify it more effectively. This was originally developed for a concert performance related to the symposium 'Land Music: sound practices in the age of ecological crisis' at City University in September 2019

We started Sound::Gender::Feminism::Activism to see who, in the field of sound arts and experimental music, was working to challenge the dominant canon of theory and practice established largely by white male artists and academics throughout the twentieth century. We also wanted to provide a space to investigate and share new work and collectively to rethink what sound arts could be. The response was amazing. The first SGFA in London 2012 brought together an international array of academics, artists, musicians, engineers and music journalists to share their working interests and concerns. It was followed by SGFA 2014 which asked: "What, in the historical present, might constitute an activist life in sound?" and queried the place and performance of activism within the discourses and practices of sound arts engaged with gender, feminist and queer politics. In SGFA 2016 we sought to listen to the complex interplay between the auditory and social protocols of "White Noise". Now working with our collaborators in Tokyo, we seek to widen the network and to develop this area of research in Japan and East Asia. This short paper will discuss some of the areas of work and research that has developed over this time.

'…the pickle jar is her home…' is an original composition by Cathy Lane, with a digital release on Verdure engraved, It is available at http://verdureengraved.bandcamp.com/album/2017-1 …The pickle jar is her home … Is a multi-faceted exploration of food as a material, a commodity and as a sounding substance. It explores the many relationships between food and sound from their intrinsic ephemerality to the metaphors that tie them as materials to be processed and transformed – mixed, chopped, cut and blended. …The pickle jar is her home … uses sound recordings from the UK and India, of food being prepared and cooked; of the places where food is grown and sold; of people and companies selling food and food products and of people talking about food that reminds them of home and childhood and foods that they like to cook and how to prepare them. The research for this piece into personal and global food culture included looking into how food, spices and materials have been and are still central to colonialism and how political exchanges have influenced food, food preparation and taste. This seems particularly pertinent in India where battles between small producers and agribusiness which have, by and large, been long lost in Western Europe, are very much current and where strong regional food cultures seem to still be holding up against and possibly enriched by cultural invasions from Europe and the US. I am also interested in people's emotional investment in food - as a carrier of memory and of ideas of "home". This work was made using 'Deja Vu', a bespoke software program designed in collaboration with Oliver Bown for matching sonically similar sonic textures or pitch shapes regardless of context, subject or origin. Thanks to all the interview participants, Srishti College of Art, Bangalore, London College of Communication, Sujata and Anurag at Rainforest Retreat and Margie Medlin who now has a more conventional home.

Talk given as part of 'Political Aesthetics in Sound Art: Gender and Feminism' at Sonic Waterloo festival , IK L E C T I K, Old Paradise Yard' 20 Carlisle Lane, SE1 7LG

A Manifesto for New Listening (or 20 thought about Listening) is an ongoing work that seeks to question the politics and aesthetics of listening. In particular, it queries five specific aspects of listening as it is formulated within current sound arts practice. The first is the idea that listening is a solitary activity best done alone, removed from society (for better listening) and accompanied by technology (also for better listening). The second is that you have to be taught how to listen 'properly' by an 'expert'. The third is that listening is always a good thing – we should listen and listen well with full attention. The fourth is that listening is an equal playing field unaffected by our individual subjective positions – for example by our gender, our racial identity, our nationality or our class. The fifth is that almost everything needs to be listened to very closely and attentively – except people (see the first).

How is memory formed and reformed? How do pieces of history get lost? What happens when we only hear one side of a story or when the sonic traces of other perspectives have disappeared? Cathy Lane works with the sounding out of individual and collective memories that have been overlooked or muted. These may relate to place, family, labour or aspects of social, cultural and political life. This professorial platform will take the form of a multichannel performative lecture.

Stereo sound work (9'59"). The wind is ever present in the Outer Hebrides activating sound in everything: – in the trees at Stornoway castle; blowing dried leaves down a deserted road on a empty Stornoway Sunday; in the reeds at Luskentyre, Harris with wild geese flying overhead; making the gate at the ruined and deserted Ormacleit Castle, South Uist sing a song that is repeated and varied in numerous gates, fences and sheep pens all over the Hebrides; whipping up a huge surf at beaches all over the west side; making the empty of containers at Griminish harbour on North Uist rattle and thunder; driving wind turbines mad …….and constantly buffeting the microphone from all sides. In 2006 I visited the Communn Eachdradh Nis (Ness Historical Society) on the West side of Lewis. In between searching though the immense amount of material on croft histories as well as videos of herring girls, hand spinning and road dances, Alison Brown and Mairi MacKenzie (who was kindly translating from the Gaelic) chatted to me about the proposed wind farm which I had seen the plans for in a shop front in Stornoway. At that time apparently almost every one was against this proposal for a huge amount of windmills stretching across the moor from Tolsta to Ness which would be able to be seen from the Ullapool – Stornoway ferry as well as heard over a wide area. These plans for one of Europe's largest windfarms on Barvas Moor were rejected by the Scottish government in early 2008. In 2012 a much smaller (36 instead of 181 turbines) and relocated scheme to land west of Stornoway was given the go ahead. Nowadays every inhabited island seems to have at least one community hall for concerts, ceilidhs, Scottish dancing, sales of work, yoga etc and many of them are running from their own wind turbines. 'Gaoth' is one of the many the Scottish Gaelic words for 'wind'. The Outer Hebrides are the most strongly coherent Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) speaking area in the world. Gaelic is a Celtic language related to Welsh, Cornish and Breton. In the 1901 and 1921 censuses, all parishes were reported to be over 75% Gaelic speaking, By 1971 most areas were still more than 75% Gaelic speaking and it remains a relatively strong in spite of a continued decline. In the 2001 census 61.1% of the population of the Outer Hebrides spoke Gaelic (compared with 1.2% in the whole of Scotland). A handful of Gaelic speakers can be found in the United States, Canada and Australia most of whom are descended from nineteenth century emigrants.

Multichannel sound installation. Preparations for an Imaginary conflict 14'00" was originally commissioned for "Staging Disorder", an exhibition which considered the relationship between photography, sound art and modern conflict. Using recorded material UK public information media, oral history, archival news, texts and specific geographical sites, the work examines the rhetoric of war which has been used by successive generations of politicians to prepare the public for a possible attack or to build up the idea of the hostile 'other' in a number of real and fictional situations.