Dancing With Toots Benedicta is a meditation on longing, belonging and dispossession, of love, loss and grief, that tunes into a slow dance across the Indian Ocean. Toots Benedicta, my grandmother, was born in what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in the early 1900s, emigrating to Australia in 1950. Her story is a complex one, and our relationship was a distant one. I remember meeting her only a handful times before she died. These sounds are a love letter to her, an invocation to entwine our memories in a slow movement across time and space and spirit worlds.
You Will Never Travel, composed for the first episode of A Thousand Channels as part of the Colomboscope Interdisciplinary Arts Festival, responds to the Australian government’s racist use of horoscopes to deter Sri Lankan immigration to Australia.
The Rub was recorded during protests against the introduction of university fees, the decimating of the Educational Maintenance Allowance and the onslaught of Conservative austerity policies in London. Recorded using binaural microphones, the work seeks to place the listener in the thick of it, rubbing up against the crowd, for a brief moment of revolutionary possibility.
Crisis Ordinary, engaging noise politics and aesthetics of the ordinary, questions intimate political attachments – to political identities and histories – where listening and scanning the airwaves reveals its own mechanics of mediation. This piece encounters the noise in the soundspace, within an ongoing activity of social antagonism, to engender forms of “‘ambient citizenship’ – politics as a scene in which the drama of the distribution of affect/noise meets up with scenarios of movement” to challenge normative distinctions of who has the formal and informal right to take up soundspace (Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism, pp230). Included in Museruole Women in Experimental Music (2013). Headphone listening in a public place recommended.
Femifesto seeks to challenge the role of the ‘woman composer,’ the idea of ‘woman’ as a category, sexuality, music and art. Composed using Max/MSP with spoken word, samples and synthesis, Femifesto, taking it’s stimulus from the themes evoked in Bruce Nauman’s seminal sound installation Days, is included in ICA London’s sound art exhibition, Soundworks.
Onanon and SEX were originally sixteen channel pieces composed for and performed at the City Lights concert, City University London (2012) as part of a seven-part series of works exploring the supposed seven core concepts of feminism; sex, gender, race, discrimination, equality, difference, and choice.
Composed in 2008 during the Greek riots in Athens, Just a Phase captures the sense on the street, of smoke, tear gas and fury amidst city-wide protests that seemed, for a moment, that they might change the world. Field recordings, May 68 archival recordings, phasing and time-stretching. Created with AudioSculpt, Soundhack, Max/MSP and Pro Tools.
Bricklane is a soundscape composition, a sonic snapshot in time, using binaural field recordings from Brick Lane Market in London, collected in 2005. Headphone listening recommended.
Among the Stars is comprised of samples of different artists performing ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, timestretched and spatialised using SoundHack. Composed for a friend’s graduation show at Slade School of Fine Art, London.