Inventory closes with an immersive series of performances drawing connections between the written word and sound, projection, moving image and the psychedelic. Jessica Higgins will perform the latest iteration of you over there in the trojan horse, a spoken word and sound collage project about a fictional monologue and the voice that delivers it. As the monologue tries to convince the people in the room that they are future versions of themselves, the voice grapples with the structural politics of the performance itself, oscillating between the art of persuasion and the craft of vulnerability. Combining spoken word performance and sound collage, the piece snakes through the imagined spaces of living rooms, kitchens, buffet foods, the bucket of a window cleaner, the confines of the “well regarded institution” and the symbolic passenger seat of a car. Originally conceived as a self published pamphlet (I am Writing a Monologue, 2022) and commissioned by Radiophrenia as a live-to-air performance (a wall, slightly too thin, 2023) this latest presentation marks the launch of raspberry raspberry, a new series of pamphlets produced by The Grass is Green in the Fields for You which will publish performance texts and texts on performance by artists working at—and with—the intersections of sound, music and the voice.
Raheel Kahn & Amrit Randhawa will perform a new collaborative piece, creating an experimental collage of archival video works accompanied with a live sound piece tracing the upward social mobility of both their Punjabi and Kashmiri roots, focusing on British Asian music and its post-industrial genealogy. The collated VHS footage will be underpinned by both secular and non-secular sonics, alongside a backdrop of machine noise and social acoustics. The chopped and screwed footage is an attempt at articulating the ongoing, yet non-linear nature of personal experience.
The evening will close with sets from Ghostlore of Britain and Sanctuary of Praise. Ghostlore of Britain (Kieron Livingstone & Sarah Hartnett) deliver musical vibrations and meditations to break through the veiling power of Maya and self-perpetuating control mechanisms. Their investigations and experiences across the psychic and embodied landscape in the South of England have informed the basis of Ghostlore’s music and film, undertaking psychic quests as their methodology, traversing the landscape as an embodied pursuit to unearth a complex politics of memory. Sanctuary of Praise make music oscillating between the murky and the jangly, creating a unique sound that's a greyscale-rendered grab bag of lo-fi aesthetics. Equal parts melodic, motorik, and miserablist, their sound is reminiscent of Lives of Angels through a chorus pedal, with a significant devotion to The Cure. The dulcet tones of the singer Swirly suggest they've witnessed many sunrises.
Please be advised: This event will feature strobe lighting effects.