Friday 28 March 2014

Sat 29 March - Bruce Hamilton's original sound art piece

Hennecker's Ditch Fantasy" is an acousmatic text-sound composition
based on a poem by Katharine Kilalea. All sounds in the piece
originate from a recording of Kilalea reading her poem "Hennecker's
Ditch" in public.

My work is not a setting of the poem, or a depiction of events and
images in the text, but is rather a psychological reaction to
Kilalea's poem and an exploration of a sound world.

Voice, a cough, and ambient noise (including recording hiss) each play
integral roles, but it's the sound gestures within the poetry that
help form recurring musical motives, albeit often highly processed.
Some of the poem's words are intelligible but they are often
rearranged and multilayered.

Kilalea speaks of writing this poem over the course of an
anxiety-ridden year, and the ways in which she attempted to convey
emotions indirectly rather than describing them. In contrast, my
"Fantasy" was produced in a three-day immersion and is my own gut
response to the poem, abstract and similarly indirect. The piece
features shifting moods and tonalities as it plays with contrasting
degrees of clarity, frequency and space.


"Hennecker's Ditch Fantasy" was written for Jude Cowan Montague's "The
News Agents" radio program on Resonance FM (London).


American musician Bruce Hamilton composes and performs music in a
variety of genres. A professor at Western Washington University,
Hamilton organizes the Bellingham Electronic Arts Festival and runs
the Spectropol netlabel. Hamilton lives in Bellingham, Washington with
composer Lesley Sommer and their son Miles.

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