works
for tape Orbs of cassava are suspended in a blend of the white liquid food of mammaliaforms, an extraction of Camellia sinensis leaves, and the sweet-tasting carbohydrates in plant tissue. But all I can think about is whether I will successfully puncture the plastic film of this drink I paid too much for.
for tape (24'40") Anastomosis is the connection of two normally divergent things. ‘Anastamosing’ is the first in a series of works that encourage the sensing of a changing climate by fostering sensorial, embodied knowledge-making. Hydrophonic recordings of the Nieuwe Maas river are manipulated to activate public listening and promote kinaesthetic urbanity.
for harp and projection (13'23") Breath is process. Air enters and exits the lungs. Cyclic movements. Repetitions. Follow your breath as you listen. Learn from your breathing. Place yourself in a room that is silenced by noise. Place yourself in a room that echoes with silence. Give yourself room to explore different modes of listening. Give yourself permission to disorganise your hearing. See what follows you. Sander Bos - Harp Composed by Carmel Freeman
for ensemble of improvisers, tape, projection (9'49") Oiseau/tsipor/vogel/bird mean the same thing but feature their own musical activity. The discreet sound components of the words are graphed using phonetic categories for speech sounds and assigned a register. Players must, through their instrument, connect to the timbres of these utterances and splinter the divide between language and music. Nina Künzel - voice Agnes Eyja Gunnarsdóttir - violin Jan Zygmunt - cello Carmel Freeman - composition, piano, foot flute
video installation (12'45") Consciousness can be simulated in a computer. Nano-machines transformed planets into computers. A single planetary computer runs millions of ancestor simulations. With simulated consciousnesses outnumbering biological ones, I am likely a simulation.
video installation (11'17") Everything that will happen has happened and is happening. The flesh of time is revealed by an awareness of its non-linearity. Capturing this infinite moment proves difficult for a video camera struggling not to travel forward in time. Carmel Freeman - Composition, Video Manipulation, Guitar, Radio, Electronics Nina Künzel - Voice Mireia Costa Viladrich - Violin
video installation (4'44") Scientists have demodulated recently discovered signal transmissions received by trees as antennae. For the first time, this sound world is untangled and unmuted. Is this communication? Is this entertainment? Who owns these sounds?
for instrumented shoe, laptop, projection (2'27") A pair of shoes, their identity concealed by a cloak of toilet paper, glue and scraps. The shoes are in control: manipulating the voice of Nike creator Phil Knight, disintegrating a video of Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at then-US president George W. Bush. Created and performed by Carmel Freeman
for electric guitar (12'15") The term diphthong comes from the Greek diphthongos, meaning two sounds. In a diphthong, the speech apparatus (ex. tongue) moves during the sounding of the first vowel. I wanted to explore ways a sound can unfold in time, rather than appear and disappear as a single, static event.
for string duo (7'00") This work was part of my masters research into the use of speech sounds in my compositional practice. I was very much inspired by the embodied knowledge gained in transcribing and interpreting a baby crying, and sought to explore the many subtle musical elements - glissandi and vibrati, development of limited pitch material - that operate in this basic form of expression. Rather than sketch a piece that was strictly programmatic (that is, meant to resemble a baby’s cry as closely as possible) I also sought to incorporate more abstract elements.
for chamber orchestra (7'14") I was inspired to navigate my experiences with bipolar disorder, which I was diagnosed with more than a decade ago. After an upsetting interaction with my dentist where he asked if I’m out in the streets violently attacking the public when I don’t take the medication I wanted to explore the space between extremes, the notion of active disengagement, emotional activity and passivity.
for tape (8'20") Inspired by the increasingly difficult task of distinguishing human voices from synthesised ones after a phone call with a customer service bot. I began to think if it even mattered, and what this meant for the imagined futures of society and of art. Sounds are designed to recreate the attack of a tongue, the depth of guttural speech sounds, the instability of sung notes all in an effort to explore the space between the natural and the unnatural.
for tape (6'00") Music unfolds in time. Rhythms divide the flow of time into the audible and inaudible, the long and the short, the stressed and the unstressed. “We Are Time” builds a soundscape detached from time’s arrow. I’ve used sounds recorded at Rotterdam Centraal as a space inextricably linked to time. The station is a space of waiting, scheduling. Trains are on time. People run out of time. In creating the materials for this work, I liberated the sounds in the field recording from the time- domain through phase vocoding. The new fabric of space and time woven by these sounds invites the listener to discover new ways of listening to their environment, re-imagine the acoustic ecologies of their life, explore the link between themselves and their environment with sound as a mediator. This piece was commissioned by EUC as part of their Universe in You radio program/sound walk, which aired on Radio Worm.
for tape (7'21") The listener is encouraged to access and experience AH! where its materials were recorded (Albert Heijn) as an augmentation of the acoustic ecology of the supermarket. I explore sound as a conditioned stimulus, with certain sounds (such as the notification that an item is on "Bonus") eliciting an emotional response in the shopper that I can exploit and subvertThis piece was created as part of Josue Amador’s A Different Soundscape project out of sounds from an Albert Heijn in Rotterdam (processed in Max/MSP).
for tape (7'25") I imagined the soundscape of the origins of language as a primordial ooze of utterances. I wanted to play with this notion, detaching words from their syntactic meaning and utilising language/s as a universal library of physical gestures.
for hybrid orchestra (11'00") The forest is an environment of dualities in flux, of stasis and activity. A space where individuality and co-existence, spontaneity and ritual are intertwined. In this composition tones are sounded like trees in a dialogue with themselves and each other. The hebrew proverb "most trees don’t see the forest" (more commonly translated to “see the forest for the trees”) was used to generate musical material and embody the irony in becoming so focused on an object you no longer see it.
for piano trio (3'15") The COVID-19 pandemic: social interactions are transplanted to videotelephonic interfaces. Our lives take place online, remotely and at a distance from each other. This composition speaks to the latency inherent in these platforms (zoom, etc.) as well as the disconnect propagated by the new normal. Marco Silva - Violin Jan Zygmunt - Cello S'yo Fang - Piano
video installation (2'02") A simple measurement has taken on a completely new meaning. As well as being performed in quarantine, the musical gestures are shaped by a social distancing architecture that has forced us to be both linked and detached, intertwined and isolated. Maria Martpay - Marimba Mayuko Takeda - Bass Clarinet Ola Kwiatkowska - Violin Chema Martinez Martinez - Violoncello Composed by Carmel Freeman