⁽ⱽᴵˢᴵᵀᴵᴺᴳ ᴾᴿᴬᶜᵀᴵᴼᴺᴱᴿ⁾ ᴸᴵˢᴬ ᴮᵁˢᴮʸ ⁻ ᴬ ᴮᴼᴰʸ ᴴᴬˢ ᴬ ⱽᴼᴵᶜᴱ

Last week, in the visiting practitioner session, I had the opportunity to understand better the work of Lisa busby. She’s a Scottish vocalist and improviser, either with the body and vocal instrument. She’s intrigued with small artifacts and fragments of sound and noise. She’s also an experimental turntablist and sampler.
Her work is very diverse between performance and composing, making her projects intangible, as she mentioned to hardly pre-meditate a performance before its execution.
The project that I found to be more fascinating to me were “proposal of a song” – a musical piece inspired by Kim Gordon’s “proposal for a story” poem:  

This poem, to my eyes, reflects a dirty realism vibe as well as an automated and surrealist poem that touches the exquisite cadaver type of lyricism. In “proposal for a song”, we get the same sensation, once the style is very related to the plunderphonic genre and everything sounds related and not related at the same time. Although, you get to feel some very interesting percussion patterns and melancholic harmonic sounds.

This type of production really absorbs me as it provokes some real good brain chemistry – good vibrational synapses. You feel engaged and connected to the organized and yet trashy elegance of the music. Her voice reminds me of Mimi Parker (Low’s vocalist) and Björk (Björk), which made me formulate these two questions to Lisa:

1) Q: Do you think of voices, and their timbre, as something sampleable? A: yes! I’m very interested in small sections of things and how they can be repeated and can that power be affected.

2) Q: Do you see your vocal instrument as a DAW? A: No and that’s because I’ve never thought about it before.

To be frank, I’m not very happy with the outcome that my questions took, but I’m happy to know she looks to the vocal instrument in the way I thought about them. I was imagining that she would take the timbre of a specific voice and try to manipulate it afterward. In addition to this topic, I highly recommend Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica (album). It is a plunderphonics record made out of samples of American ads from the 80s and the 90s. The album talks about “The idea of the replica in culture as a way we deal with the decline of knowledge, or human knowledge going to waste because we’re not immortal”.