lullaby, for (2019/21)
Medium: feedback improvisation for a jar of water from a natural source,
pollutants, found objects, hydrophone, portable speaker, and field recording
Duration: 13 min 26 sec
lullaby, for is an experimental feedback improvisation environment. I collect water from a natural source, like a river or lake, and objects from the same location, especially trash and debris. I perform by creating a feedback loop between a hydrophone (a waterproof microphone) placed in the water and a small speaker that plays a field recording. The feedback is mediated by the water itself and whatever interfering material I add from my collection—the complex wave transmissions are bifurcated and redirected by the objects.
For this performance I gathered water and materials from the Seekonk River, which bounds Providence, Rhode Island to the east. Rhode Island is significantly marked by the wedge of the Narragansett Bay, an estuary that connects tendrils of New England waterways to the Atlantic Ocean. The Seekonk is one of these tendrils. It is a brackish river deeply affected by the tides, home to swans and geese and herons on its banks and fish like striped bass in its waters. I spend many evenings walking along it with my wife and our dog.
lullaby, for is a piece about noticing. Looking for objects that line the banks of local waterways reframes my view of the site. Cigarette packets, discarded soda cans or plastic bottles, one-ounce liquor shots, food wrappers and lids, debris like driftwood and loose stones, a child’s doll: in multiple states and countries I have never failed to find such material refuse. Looking for these scraps forces a granularity of attention that changes my relationship to the space. I deeply resonate with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s insistence that “[i]t’s not just land that is broken, but more importantly, our relationship to land… our relationship with land cannot heal until we hear its stories.”1 What stories am I attending to at the Seekonk? Can I understand these found materials as traces of the ecological paths water has carved into the region, the infrastructures that are built up around it, the forceful removal of the Narragansett People who were its stewards for many centuries and who remain in Rhode Island, the markers of human activity that accumulate onto its banks or under its waves?
The feedback loop in lullaby, for relies on close listening and careful movement. There is no virtuosity to the performance, just patience. Changing the speaker’s location creates new feedback loops and the speed at which I do (or don’t) move affects the feedback’s capacity to buildup, interfere with other frequencies, or fade away. We hear this as tonal shadings of the field recording, which is always already inviting an emergent listening that negotiates multiple layers of position and awareness. In lullaby, for, this emergence is literal: the piece is not about just the recording, or the materials, or the water, or the feedback, but how I attend to their interplay as relational attention.
[1] Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, (Milkweed Editions, 2013), 9.
*please click on the image to read the caption
Artist Bio
James May is a composer, improviser, sound artist, and photographer working primarily with experimental notation, improvisation, field recordings, and interactive electronics. He’s interested in emergent listening and unstable sonic systems, building unfurling spaces in which performers and listeners can dwell. James has collaborated on performances and recordings with Ekmeles, Longleash, Re:Duo, Versipel New Music, Apply Triangle, Hypercube, Chamber Choir Ireland and Paul Hillier, Stephanie Lamprea, Will Yager, Jamie Monck, the San Francisco Choral Artists, and the University of Louisville Orchestra and Collegiate Chorale. He received a 2024 Ucross Artist Residency, and his work has been programmed and recognized by the Sound + Environment Symposium, International Computer Music Conference, MISE-EN Festival, Birdfoot Festival, Omaha Under the Radar, New Music on the Bayou, and the Institute for Choral Creativity.
James is originally from Pittsburgh, PA, and based in Providence, RI, where he’s completing a PhD in music and multimedia composition at Brown University. He was one of 12 recipients of the 2018-19 U.S.–Ireland Alliance Scholarship, funding an MA in experimental sound practice at University College Cork, and previously studied at the University of Louisville and the College of Wooster.
Website: www.jamesmaycomposer.com
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