THOUGH ERIN GEE’S Whispered Folds performance, on a bill with Brady Marks and Viva Pacheco at the Annex on October 17, won’t be as multifaceted as Attariwala’s, it is likely to prove no less thought-provoking and perhaps even more immersive. If, that is, you have no objection to being immersed in the humus and leaf litter of a forest grave. In it, the Montreal-based electronic composer and voice artist will attempt to give voice to the fungi, bacteria, and invertebrates that assist a buried body in its inevitable return to dust.
There’s often a philosophical element to Gee’s work: earlier productions have been inspired by feminist theory, and by the techniques of emotional manipulation in the digital realm. For In Bloom, however, a concern with mortality began to rise during the COVID era, and simply needed an outlet.
“I guess I just found myself thinking about the afterlife, and thinking about the power of music and sound to have us moving through these spaces that are normally impossible,” Gee explains. “And the most impossible place, to me, seemed to be the afterlife, because it’s an utter mystery. We don’t know what happens to ourselves after death.
“I started imagining ‘What if nature itself had a voice that would whisper to you?’” she continues. “Like, ‘What would it say, and how would it be?’ And that is impossible, but the thought that occurred to me is that nature is brutal and disgusting and beautiful, all at the same time. I assume that nature loves us, but not in these ways that we can understand. So what kind of voice would nature have? And when I say ‘nature’, I was thinking of the bacteria and fungal matter that would come to kind of process your body—and embrace your body—after death. So I stage this encounter between you, from the perspective of having recently been dead, and the voice of nature as it decomposes you.”
Unusually for Gee, who’s best known as a composer-performer, In Bloom was a commissioned work, originally intended to be performed by Montreal composer and inventor Jean-François Laporte. And in the process of writing it, Gee rather gleefully jumped into Laporte’s sonic universe, generated by a wild assortment of hand-made sound generators that combine air compressors, membranophones, resonant bowls, and whistling ducts.
“They’re just very odd sounds,” Gee reveals. “There’s a lot of these rubbing, grinding, very brass-like sounds. I would say, as somebody who used to play the trombone, that they remind me a lot of trombone noises, actually, with a lot of metallic clicks and a lot of different things rubbing over the surface of the membrane, creating what I thought of as birth sounds. And there’s a lot of my voice. So when I was composing these tracks in my studio, I remember listening to them and also listening to a lot of natural soundscapes from the forest and thinking ‘I want to be somehow outside of my voice. Like, I need to be the voice of an animal crying, and I want it to be something bigger than a human. Something primal.’
“The piece does start out with a lot of foreboding to it,” she adds, laughing. “But the voice kind of constantly reassures you that the process of decomposition is absolutely painless, and maybe even pleasant. And there are some more ecstatic parts, where I describe, with very poetic language, the mycelium entering your spine and kind of caressing the inside of you. It sounds very peaceful. But the way that the piece ends is so mysterious that it leaves you in that continuity. The story doesn’t quite finish itself.”
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