Sunday, February 27, 1994

Lullabye

This was one of several performances Laurie Amat & I collaborated on. I would make a cassette mix tape, a sound-score with a theme, that Laurie would listen to for the first time, through headphones, blindfolded, during the performance, ie the audience could only hear her spontaneously-improvised singing, not the tape score she was singing in response to. In this performance, while she was singing from inside of a broken chair, I lay on my back on the floor under a flourescent light fixture suspended only inches above the length of my body. Otherwise the room was dark.

In each hand I held a red Sharpie magic marker above a large piece of paper. I wrote spontaneously in response to Laurie's singing & to what I knew of the score & theme. I tried to write the same text simultaneously with each hand. Of course I'm just right-handed so the left-hand text was basically illegible, but the right-hand text was also deeply flawed by my being blindfolded and by the splitting of my concentration. This thing I was attempting was difficult and oddly interesting to me; it's very satisfying to me both conceptually & visually. I've always wanted to do it again, but haven't.