The Melding of Sparks and Horizons (Rebecca and Ken at Oracle Egg)

Описание: The Melding of Sparks and Horizons
Rebecca Lloyd-Jones & Ken Ueno
Oracle Egg — January 21, 2025
Video documentation: Eli Klausner
Editing and post-production: Ken Ueno

In this duo for bowed cymbals (Lloyd-Jones) and voice (Ueno), amplification operates as an instrument in its own right. As sustained tones bloom from the cymbals, Ueno positions a hand-held microphone between them, isolating and magnifying specific partials. These frequencies are projected through the PA and fed back into the vibrating metal, sympathetically activating further overtones. Subtle changes in proximity recalibrate the harmonic field, turning the space into a dynamic resonant chamber.

The work recalls Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I in its treatment of the microphone as exploratory probe, and resonates with the texture-driven, durational practices of Lê Quan Ninh. Yet it extends these lineages through the volatile addition of voice as a second spectral engine.

Singing multiphonics into a megaphone, Ueno reinforces frequencies activated by the cymbals while introducing additional partials that occupy adjacent bandwidths. At times the voice locks onto a ringing overtone, intensifying it; at others it fills spectral gaps, thickening the field from within. The megaphone focuses and colors the projection, sharpening the interplay between metal, breath, and circuitry.

This entanglement—cymbal, microphone, PA, megaphone, body—recalls the hybrid assemblage articulated in A Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway. Boundaries between human and machine, acoustic and electronic, instrument and performer dissolve into a single feedback organism. The performance stages co-constitution: sound emerging from relational circuitry in which agency is distributed across bodies, objects, and systems, a living cyborgian ecology of resonance—modernist inquiry, improvisatory embodiment, and technological mediation braided into one vibrating horizon.