A live performance by Jamie Hamilton and the Phaedra Ensemble, exploring the territory between spoken language and musical sound, through the stammered voice.
Join us at The Historic Dockyard Chatham for A Mouth In Search Of A Voice, a new performance by composer Jamie Hamilton and Phaedra Ensemble, made with the voices of people who stammer. Doors open at 6pm, refreshments will be provided from 6-7pm, and the hour long performance will begin at 7pm.
Over the past year Jamie has worked with stammerers across the UK, recording their speech as compositional material, which is then collaged, layered and woven into a score for live ensemble, electronics and video.
These voices move between recognisable speech and something stranger, stretched into texture and rhythm, recounting storms that twisted trees from the earth and the paths speech takes through the brain, told as flat, bewildered testimony.
Live strings, bass clarinet, keyboard and electronics play through and around these recordings to the backdrop of a new moving image work in response to the composition.
Hamilton’s electronics draw on physical modelling of the human vocal tract – recreating the voice at different stages in its evolution – and repurposes medical speech analysis software as a musical instrument.
Jamie, who stammers, has long worked with phonemes and sub-syllabic sound, in a practice shaped by his own dysfluent speech. He produced Meredith Monk and Phaedra Ensemble’s forthcoming album Realms, and co-directs the ensemble.
A Mouth In Search Of A Voice has been commissioned by Cement Fields and Phaedra Ensemble, supported by Arnolfini and STAMMA. It is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. This event has been kindly supported by The Historic Dockyard Chatham.
