→ Your Body is a Colony
First commissioned: Music Space Architecture Festival
Revised version performance 2025 UK Venue TBC
Concept, sound, live electronics, scenography: Cameron Graham
Performer: Anastasia Tolchneva
At what stage does sound breach the physical body? Where is the line between sound as phenomenon, and sound as catalyst?
A performance installation for solo performer, infrasound, stethoscope microphones and controlled feedback, YBiAC explores the virtual yet violent tensions between sound as pleasurable and enriching, and sound as exploitable, ruinous, erasing.
The installative performance first poetically attunes a large speaker array to the resonant frequencies of bodily organs to create an active feedback loop that ‘sonifies’ the performer’s body , transforming the assemblage of skin, bone and organs into a generator of feedback. A redesigned stethoscope microphone is live-controlled to sidechain the speaker outputs, subsuming the performance space in the pulsic rhythms of the performer’s heartbeat. Later, a stack of redesigned sub-bass speakers propel infrasound waves towards the performer over 45 minutes, nodding to histories of American warfare research into the weaponising potential of low frequency.
Finally, a glass soviet chandelier laying on a speaker suddenly shatters