An excerpt from the soundtrack for Death by Water, a performance installation created in collaboration with Toronto/Brooklyn theatre company bluemouth inc.
Death by Water is a performance installation that places a listening audience with headphones in a small wooden shed in the middle of a city park in winter. While their visual focus is directed out through a large plexiglass window towards performers moving through the park landscape, their headphones are fed a real-time binaural mix of live and pre-recorded sources – signals from the performer’s (Lucy Simic) wireless microphones, fragments of manipulated found sounds (turntable noises, the voice and shamisen of Japanese-Canadian musician Aki Takahashi, archival recordings of Hibari Misora and binaural field recordings of the park made at various times of the year).
Like much of my headphone-based audio work, this project seeks to challenge the perceivable boundaries between inside/outside, actual/fictional, real/imagined from within poetic and environmental contexts.
Richard C. Windeyer 