The Weirding Module UNEASY w/ Audrey Chen

There’s a kind of unease that you see in an audience exposed to sound poetry and extended vocal practices for the first time. It’s shocking to hear the voice – usually an organ for articulating sense via words or harmony – used to create noise, non-speech, non-sense. Such practices go far beyond word plays and poetic nonsense which remain at all times near-sense and in dialogue with language.

Instead, by pushing against the limits of the vocal tract, the breath and the body, experimental vocal practices reveal the boundaries and show the shape of the body’s insides – at least the parts which air can enter and escape from.

Such threshold defining practices are often experienced by those who hear them, as symptoms. The performer is intuited as contagious, dangerous or both. The invisible boundary of the stage provides a context for an experience that one might otherwise cross the street to avoid.

Audrey Chen describes compressing her experiences into “an accumulated mass of muscle memory, knowledge and personal biography.” that is re-expanded during performance “through a kind of physical, technical process/release”. This is a description of a body-memory storage system that combines behavioural imprinting and musical training, and it is diagrammed through live performance using “all sounds that I [she] can achieve, heavily amplified”.

Sometimes there is a squeamishness about hearing the internal workings of the body so starkly portrayed, but sound can express the shape of the living body ( through one of the mediums that sustains it – air) while the traditional method of depicting anatomy is via the still image, unmoving and often dead.