My starting point for my project was thinking about women’s forms of communications. I was interested in Marie Thompson’s idea of ‘feminine noise’ (2013, pg 301), and the ways in which it is heard as unwanted or extraneous.

I started by taking a field recording from the Unicorn Theatre in Southwark, where a group of trans artists I was part of made noises together. I took moments of communication from this, between the various trans noises which were happening, and structuring them to create a composition around the theme of the communication (between voices and objects in the space/recording).

During a UAL Intersectional Feminist Society Social, in which we visited the Feminist Library in Peckham, there was a free-writing session after we had explored the extensive archive of zines, books and activist memorabilia. I wrote about the intersections of feminine noise with trans voices. Responding to Marie Thompsons piece, I reflected on how trans voices are also seen as unwanted noise. I plan to write more about this in a future blog post, but will not explore it further here as there is not the space.

I was also inspired by the Her Noise exhibition, originally at the South London Gallery in 2005. A collection of all woman sound artists, it was pioneering for its time.

All of my sites of interest were deliberately chosen throughout South London and specifically Southwark. The South London Gallery is on the same road as where I live, and the Her Noise archive is in the LCC Archives and Special Collections Centre in Elephant & Castle. Similarly, the Unicorn Theatre is also in Southwark and the Feminist Library is in Peckham.

As I worked with sound first, rather than the other way around, I was also writing to fit the sound. This was an interesting way to work, as it moulded the words to take a certain shape and the sound of the words and how they fit into the composition became really important, just as important as their semantics.

A lot of the sounds which you hear in the piece are glitches, for example the looping of the word ‘girl’ in one audio track was a mistake due to a buffer mismatch with my DAW and my zoom interface – however I decided to leave it in. This decision alludes to the idea of the glitch as a cyber-feminism.

Le Tigre:
“Johanna Fateman: It really struck us that, when men make mistakes, it’s fetishized as a glitch 
Kathleen Hanna: Something beautiful.
Johanna: And when women do it, it’s like . . .
Kathleen: . . . a hideous mistake.
Johanna: Right, it’s not considered an artistic innovation or a statement or an intentional thing.”
(Rodgers, 2010)

bounce v1:

References:

Thompson, M (2013) “Gossips, Sirens, Hi-Fi Wives: Feminizing the Threat of Noise” in Resonances: Noise and Contemporary Music. New York: Bloomsbury.

Rodgers, T. (2010) Pink Noises: Women on Sound and Electronic Music. Durham, London: Duke University Press.