Sonic Psychosis  

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An exploration of internal voices through poetic structure and spatialised sound. 

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This spoken word piece sought to explore the borders of knowledge and question the terms of diagnosis: who can be deemed to have the presence of multiple voices, personas, to have psychotic experiences, how are these factors evaluated and by who? I researched common thought and speech disorders associated with psychosis and found they had a similar resonance to certain post-modern experimental creative writing techniques. 

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Rather than questioning a simple sanity / insanity binary and conflating those with genuine clinical needs and those who do not, the piece sought to complicate the idea of health and the terms of diagnosis whilst simultaneously seeking new poetic structures. Since Foucault it has become more common to question to what extent our present power structures encourage or benefit from binary categorisations of sanity and insanity, and in that regard, this piece was no exception. 

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Central to my exploration were the following questions: if I embody a character who has psychotic symptoms, what does that make me? What is the difference between being and seeming, in believing and experiencing? How do we elucidate these differences? How to disrupt grammatical rules, eradicate punctation, use adjectives as verbs, to express and complicate our relationship to the world, to objects, to one another? How stable is our self-concept, if phrased differently? 

Daily Scratchings 

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Some of the fruits of daily poetry writing, expressed verbally and contained within an album which was self-released on bandcamp. These pieces are often ekphrastic, responding to other poems, films, music, or the theatre of everyday life. They explore themes I elucidated in my bachelor thesis about the distinction between mimesis and abstraction, about how abstraction and non-mimetic forms of expression, and thus, 'representation', may be used as feminist praxis. 

Threaded Voices 

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A hybrid bred of a cut up diary, abstract experimental poetry, and a manifesto for finding mutual ground and acceptance without presuming understanding. It included pre-recording multiple versions of my voice whilst I read a piece aloud, causing overlaps, double understandings, incongruences, with the intention of manipulating grammar and composition or arrangement to maximise a plethora of possible meanings. Also manifested itself as a visual poem. 

Voice Experimentations / Improvisations with Musicians 

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I worked with a range of musicians using abstract and sound poetry to accompany their soundscapes, accompanying the improvisations on the guitar, pedals, modular synthesiser, or for more concrete arrangements. 

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My focus was on how compressing, expanding, or manipulating the body physically could have an impact on the sound, the voice, and the meaning of the words. Often I was inventing and improvising sounds from a range of languages, or distorting my English texts to the border or comprehensibility. These performances usually had some theatrical aspects, in the way that they express through the body, the dynamics that are embodied through the voice, or the way in which characters are created for the purpose of the performance. 

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These pieces can be found on my soundcloud.