Undercurrents

For A While

live set recorded for room2.fm online show on October 8, 2021. a mix of new and old fav textures (shiny, silky, swishy, fuzzy, hissy) and an ode to the sea, which I miss because my lockdown radius doesn't reach.
Thankyou to Raag Bhatia and Patrick Hase for hosting, designing and curating the room2.fm events.

Room2.fm Live Set

Live performance as part of TIME AS A SONIC GESTURE - a durational concert for headphones by Jacqui O'Reilly.

The very start of the recording features a live variation on first track (The Frequency of a Leaf) off my forthcoming album.

From Jacqui "The concept for Time as a Sonic Gesture, emerged in response to Katelyn Geard’s work, I Have Something to Say, (exhibited in GRAPHITE, at DRAW Space, April 2024). This work was described as a drawing ‘soft as a whisper’ in its reach beyond two dimensions.  Time as a Sonic Gesture plays with this notion of persistence of vision, to instantiate time as a trans-disciplinary gesture of collective presence in the making and sharing of art. Throughout the evening local guests artists Laura Altman and Alexandra Spence will improvise with O’Reilly and play solo, to unfold an experimental and immersive soundscape performance."

TIME AS A SONIC GESTURE is curated by Belinda Yee (@belindayee) as part of an ongoing series of performances looking at the relationship of drawing to sound. Photography by James Peter Brown.
https://drawspace.org/past-exhibitions-and-events/jacqui-oreilly

Live at DRAW Space March 2025

live performance at Black Box Sound Series, UNSW School of Art & Design, Sydney. 
july 2017.

Inspired by a field recording trip to South Africa w. Francisco Lopez in Nov 2016.

// Last night there was a lightning storm. Lighting up the entire sky, blocks that moved in succession, and single bolts zigzagging.

[there was no sound.]

The poignancy of a lightning storm with no sound. //


sound sources:
field recordings from Limpopo region in South Africa, voice, clarinet, sine tones, feedback, amplified objects: rock, feather, shells.

Live At Black Box Sound Series

sleep in nothingness, 2018 

// sounds heard 
samples from the Guimet's archival LP copy of 'Japanese masterpieces for the shakuhachi' (Lyrichord_MX4205_1989) 
+ artists own field recording of train ride in the monastic region of Koyasan Japan, clarinet, sine tones, voice, amplified objects, sferics, and a google-translate/text-to-speech recording of the album liner notes. // 

In a dream he found himself floating in a boat. Suddenly thick mist rolled down the sky and blocked his view of the moon. On hearing the moving melody of a flute, he reached out for his favourite bamboo flute to accompany the ethereal melody. The music is long and simple, and the listener is expected to forget everything and "sleep in nothingness".
-the dream of a priest named Kyochiku in the 12th Century while meditating at a temple in Nara (as cited in the album liner notes).

composed for performance at the Guimet Museum in Paris on Feb 03 2018, curated by the French label Tsuku Boshi.

sleep in nothingness

this is the audio from a videoart collaboration w. visual artist katrina stamatopoulos (http://katrinastamatopoulos.net/)

materials:
discarded scraps of film
breath, heartbeat, voice, sine tones.

see here for video: http://alexandraspence.net/bodyscan

Made with discarded scraps of 35mm photographic film, flashes of texture move to collect a body of material, whilst the sound waves develop a physicality as they propagate through the space between the viewers’ ears.

... like colours seen / felt when eyes are pressed closed with palms.

bodyscan

Opening tracks from my debut album 'Waking, She Heard The Fluttering', released April 5 2019 on Room40 https://alexandraspence.bandcamp.com/album/waking-she-heard-the-fluttering

***
"Her sense of field is broader. it is as if she is trying to capture a whole landscape of sound entire... Sound is sound. It is sometimes exciting, often enigmatic, rarely open to verbalisation. ...we ought to spend more time with Alexandra Spence, with our ears simply and honestly open."
- Brian Morton, The Wire

"Throughout, there’s a real flow to the otherwise disparate sounds, sending any objective significance (such as traffic, a news reader or church bells) into purely subjective, introspective realms. It is topped off perfectly by the closing piece, ‘Sky And Sea Were Indistinguishable’, whose cautious tones are left free to roam beyond ‘the field’. They arc beautifully across the listening space and ultimately fade so slowly that their end is indistinguishable, sealing the communion between artist and listener."
- The Quietus

Waking, She Heard The Fluttering

Begin / Bodies In Place

Excerpt from a release with Longform Editions. Listen/purchase the full track here https://longformeditions.bandcamp.com/track/immaterial

// 
Earlier this year I spent a two-month period on residency in Hong Kong. I was instantly drawn to the colour and vibrancy of the city, as well as to certain materials and objects that kept reappearing on my explorations.

Billowy, gauzy construction cloth that covered spiny bamboo scaffolding, the devastatingly-inviting colourful-sheen of single-use plastics, discarded durian husks, the deep blue night-time sky made hazy/dreamy/luminous from neon lighting, lush and vibrant green foliage…

I was thinking about the small variations in the repetition of these materials, as well as the repetition of certain images and sounds.

The phasing on/off flash of orange construction lights lining long stretches of road; the rhythmic phasing of multiple pedestrian crossing beeps heard simultaneously. the overhead circling of the kites (seabirds) in the sky; the below-water circling of plastic bags in the harbour.

For a little while now I’ve been cultivating an obsession with the relationships between sound, material/object and texture. How feeling can inform listening, how listening is feeling, and how this felt-listening can alter our perception of things as we are taught to ‘know’ them. For me listening is acknowledging the intrinsic connections between our surroundings and ourselves.

If we acknowledge the vibrancy and resonance of everyday objects how might this change our actions and thinking around them.

"My hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies." Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter

It occurred to me, whilst writing this and listening back, that not only are materials amplified in Immaterial but certain sounds appear almost material in themselves, such as the squeak of shoes on basketball courts, and the droplets of rain on foliage. These sounds seem not to belong to shoe or court, rain or leaf, but are formed in the entwining to become a thing in themselves. It is this connectedness through sound that I am fascinated with. Through sound unequal forms can be connected: mic distortion disguises itself as crinkling plastic bags that blends into the crackling sound of shrimp underwater.

Sound waves traverse through our bodies and our surroundings, forming knots and vibrations and connections and confusions. In sound material blends with the immaterial and new imaginaries can be made, for me this is a way out.

Immaterial was composed in parallel to these thoughts.
Like silky-soft milky tea tasted alongside a crispy-sweet pineapple bun.
//

All sounds heard on Immaterial (excepting one recording of clarinet) were recorded in Hong Kong between April and June 2019.
Composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Alexandra Spence
Additional percussion by Karen Yu
Mastered by A.F. Jones at Laminal Audio

Immaterial excerpt

Excerpt from forthcoming album with MP Hopkins 'The Divine For Me Is Whatever Is Real', to be released on More Mars, 2021.
Recorded by Alexandra and MP at Tempe Jets, mastered by Renato Grieco.

The Divine For Me Is Whatever Is real

Piano & Flue

Piano & Flute - Alexandra Spence & MP Hopkins

living on unceded Wangal Country ⌇ making sounds

Alexandra Spence

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