Jim Haynes glowing comment on Alice Kemps Decay and Persistence album! A fistful of copies are still available at FF! A hitherto unknown to us British sound artist, Alice Kemp seems to have honed her craft of cloak-n-dagger electroacoustics through the realms of performance art, with this long-form piece being a reworking of the sound designs that were commissioned by the performance art duo Weeks & Whitford. The imagery and allusions from Weeks & Whitford are gruesome (with Rebecca Weeks holding a malformed Eraserhead-like creature molded from livers and hearts in one of the photos accompanying this album) and spooky (a human hand made of frozen wine that melts all over a wedding dress worn by Weeks), in tracing the scars that are left as the trophies of love. Admittedly, theres only the various project descriptions and photographic evidence of those pieces, but Kemps sound design must have been a disturbing, claustrophobic addition to those performances, as this album would easily make her an honorary member of the notorious Schimpfluch-Gruppe. In fact, she was invited to perform at the Extreme Ritual festival alongside all of the Schimpfluch artists (e.g. Rudolf Eb.Er, G*Park, Sudden Infant, Dave Phillips, Raionbashi, etc.) with the participants and audience members alike astonished / aghast at her work. The tick-tock rhythms of a clock brace empty spaces and shadowy rumblings of tactile sounds that could very well be the calving of massive icebergs or the amplifications of blood vessels hemorrhaging just underneath a trepanned skull. Taut wire snaps and VLF crackle slowly enter the fray as Kemps overarching composition follows what Nurse With Wounds Stapleton did on Salt Marie Celeste, with a leviathan crawl of incremental psychic intensity. Lets hope this album isnt just a minor excursion for Kemp; but as it stands now, this is all we know of... and its a pro-duplicated cd-r in a nice digipack with an edition of just 100 copies. (Jim Haynes/Aquarius Records)
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 07:36:35 +0000
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