Written, Produced by Lou Barnell & Stergin
Vocals, lyrics & topline melody : Lou Barnell
Electronics by Stergin
credits
released 20 November 2014
Artwork by Fabrice Cazenzave
@LouBarnell
www.loubarnell.co.uk

"Absolutely Huge. Dark, sexy, sassy and massive. I'm totally floored-we love it. Can't wait to dance to this at 3am through some huge speakers"
(Mark Del: Nusic Nottingham)

''This sultry piece of brooding electro-pop climaxes to intense harmonies and sexy soundscapes that are quite unlike anything I've heard before. It's the perfect combination of light and dark . Angelic vocals, and twisted, brilliant, beats''
(Sam Nahirny: Left Lion Magazine)

Lyrics

I Wanna Be Your Blood
I Wanna Be Your Brain
I Wanna Run Through Your Fingers
And Run Through Your Veins
And When You're In Me
I Wanna Know What It's Like
I Wanna Feel Myself
Squeezing You Tight

I Wanna Be Your Blood

“She is the eye.
A furnace.
Vigilant Lens.
She gazes deep
Into the black chasm.
The abyss is staring back.
The dark ripples
In a fabric of thrill and dread”

All That is Solid Melts Into Air

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

These Hills Are Mirrors

Featured in the 2017 Linear Obsessional Compilation "A View From A Hill" Available to stream / download here : https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/a-view-from-a-hill 

This is a composition based on a recurring dream I have on the cusp of sleep about an ancient hill station with winding railways, tunnels, flimsy boxcars and a confusing journey to meet the folk who live there.

The text and spoken word in the piece is written about the dream.

I also ‘sing the landscapes’ of the views from my childhood: The views from the West Hill and The East Hill in Hastings are interpreted vocally, sung from my memory.

Both hills are mirrors. They look out to sea and towards each other. They share the same view. The same slice of horizon. They are places where beacons were lit in times of war to signal danger and safety. The hills form the scape of my memories, of growing up in the town. Constantly climbing.

The piece also features instruments I have made from items found on Hastings beach and mudlarking on the Thames.

(Picture: Bella Stiles: View from the West Hill Hastings.)

TEXT:

These hills are mirrors: East and West

But

This hill is gold and green

The top is dizzying

Misty to make out

Palm fronds

Distant slivers of smoke

Two brown roads

Two steep steps

The hill folk live here

Clad in yellow

Making railways

Sending and mending

Cloth and spices

Fishes silver

Leaves lap and rustle

The height is cold

The dew

Is ice in my lungs.

We climb.

Lumpen

Limping

Glimpsing

Something

What?

Another way. I know another way around.

How will we get down?

Get me down

Please please please

We climb into a wooden box.

Hollow and dry

Laden heavy

Screeching steel

Oil and quartz

So so so so fast so so so so so so fast

My eyes are spare

A man holds open the lever to a junction

Oh it is a woman

Oh it is a boy

Oh It is a man

Oh she is a girl

Will he let us through?

“Only if you have a way up again”

“-But we are going down”

CERTAINLY

SURELY

No. No no no

A mistake

You are definitely

going UP.

can we go through?

YES.

Ohmyohmyohmyohmyohmy

screaming yellowbrowngreengoldmud blur

We will see others going up and up and up

Lumpen

Limping

Loaded

Loping

Cloth and spices

Fishes silver

The hillfolk live here

Specks of yellow

Beacons of life

Mammoth mountain

Hill of gold

Paths, click and move into each other

Pull the junction lever

Up is slow

Down is sososososososo fast

Up is slow slow slow

Down is sosososososososo fast

These Hills Are Mirrors

STASIS is a composition made entirely from vocal recordings of my voice singing the same tone, inspired by Alvin Lucier's piece 'I am sitting in a room'.

The voice is both part of its own creation and its decay. 
Can sound be frozen in stasis?

Featured on the Expanded Radio Weekend 2018 

I am recording one vocal tone.
I will record this tone repeatedly
I will sing the same tone alongside its recording as it is played back and recorded in the same room again and again, until eventually my perpetual tone harmonises with the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. 
I am investigating transformation, decay and stasis of a physical act of singing.
Stasis is part of decay.
Sameness a catalyst for difference. 
Non-moving shape and tone is shaped inexorably by its environment. 

(Photo Credit: E5 Process Collective)

STASIS

Featured on  'Calibration: Volume 1 Compilation' https://experimentalsoundart.bandcamp.com/releases

Fast forwarding tapes, playing them backwards by mistake, stretching them, until they degrade and disintegrate is creating a reality that was never there before, for the sounds temporarily etched there.  It's a bit like time dreaming, or time travel, or perhaps both.
A Tape experiment using spooled lengths of cassette tapes. Homage to  the typically wonky interior of a notorious club called Stratford REX.

http://loubarnell.co.uk/TERRESTRIAL-CIRCUITS

A live sound installation and participatory composition made from the rhythms of our wiring inside and out.

Terrestrial circuits carry electronic communications across the earth and through our bodies. Wires connecting our veins, soil, blood and brain, are in constant flux, as we grow new webs of communication made of plastic, sinew and flesh.

I placed a mobile phone disguised as a landline on a coffee table, in the South East London home of curator Yuying Yang, for an open house exhibition named ‘Spring Cleaning’.

SCORE:
-       When the telephone rings, answer it.
-	Listen with your whole body. 
-       Listen to  the sounds around you and the sounds in your body.
-	Respond to the call using words or sounds.
-	Doodle, draw or write thoughts on this note pad if you wish.

TERRESTRIAL CIRCUITS

Terrestrial Circuits

http://loubarnell.co.uk/OUTPOST

Experiments in Sonic Corporeality - An immersive sound installation and durational performance exploring the collision between my internal and external worlds as a dyspraxic. Part of an OUTPOST 2018 residency.  

I navigated a map of salt using physical motifs inpired by my disoriented experience, and vocal sounds to centre myself when I became distracted. Metronomes created a strict architecture of time and dissonance against a fluid composition of feedback , time keeping devices and the resonant frequencies of my breath and pouring of salt. The public were invited to use a score to navigate the space, and add their pulse to the composition via a live sensor.
The movement performance created a physical visual score, tracing my navigation, and patterns of disorientation and distraction.

SCORE:

Walk around the space

Cover your ears

Notice your breath and footsteps

Hum quietly

Uncover your ears

Experiment with covering and uncovering your ears.

Notice when you become distracted.

With thanks to OUTPOST Gallery & Studios Norwich, Andrew Nuttall, Jason Dixon, Enya Belak Gupta, Aadhar Gupta & Monika Dorniak. Supported By Arts Council England.                                                      Photo Credit: Enya Belak Gupta

Experiments In Sonic Corporeality- Live recording OUTPOST Residency 2018

Imagine the sound of balance

Imagine the sound of suspense

Imagine the sound of fragility

Imagine the sound of strength

Make music with these sounds.

Sound design and composition for a contemporary dance piece by Enya Belak Gupta, premiered in September 2018 at Plesni Teater Ljubljana.

Blue Ink questions the borders and absurdity of bureaucracy, which ties humans in the space between. It is a reflection of a personal and political imbalance. A state of unknown, unworthiness, fear, isolation, fragility, trust and power. Blue Ink addresses the topic of borders; spatial, physical and personal. It focuses on the bureaucratic complications that shape the human present.

The composition process was an interactive physical relationship between performer, director and composer, exchanging physical scores and recordings to create a feedback loop of bodies, movement and voice into the composition.

Film: Aadhar Gupta
Choreographed and Directed by: Enya Belak Gupta
Co-creation and dance: Jerca Rožnik Novak & Gábor Ivanov
Dramaturgy: Eva Posedel
Sound Design & Composition: Lou Barnell
Director of Photography: Aadhar Dmt
Lighting Design: Janko Oven
Costume Design: Andrej Vrhovnik
Produced by: Flota, Flota, zavod, Murska Sobota
Co-produced by: @PTL - Plesni Teater Ljubljana
Supported by: Ministrstvo za kulturo in Mestna občina Ljubljana
Thanks to: Dance JSKD & Občina Ilirska Bistrica

Blue Ink

BLUE INK / MODRO ČRNILO

Composition and sound design for an interactive body sound sculpture installation by Izzie Capper. L:APSE is a liminal space that inhabits a transformative and adaptive temporal flux built from human interventions. Composition included a live physical score fusing movement, breath, voice. This was combined with the live gathering and processing of augmented interactive media from the audience.
Featuring performers: Lou Barnell and Rachel Birch-Lawson

L:APSE (Live)

A sound, image, and  movement ritual in collaboration with Tarik Haskić 
The etymology of the sea Goddess Calypso's name is from kalyptō, meaning "to cover", "to conceal", "to hide", or "to deceive". Her name means "concealing the knowledge",  It is derived from Proto-Indo-European *ḱel-, making it cognate with the English word Hell.
Heavens and oceans have been chartered for thousands of years by the boats, tools and maps of men. But mythologised in her likeness. Her  power of creation and destruction. KALYPTO is the hidden. The story of woman’s concealed yet untameable body.  
Her folkloric travels across meridians of sky and sea, battling and vanquishing those who try to conquer her. The site of terror and wonder. 

inspired by the rational search for longitude at Greenwich  versus the irrational spirit of the sea and death. It fuses field recordings of pagan rituals in Hastings, with  timekeeping devices, myths and research collated in partnership with Royal Maritime Museums Greenwich,  spoken word and a ritual using salt, paper and objects from Hastings beach to create a physical score.

KALYPTO

WEAURAL is an exploration into how we continuously create and become our selves in performance, movement and listening. It is a series of experiments into how wearable devices, performative movement, and sound unfold in the same plane of existence.

WEAURAL

Sound design and composition for an interactive gallery piece by created by Filskit Theatre  and neurodivergent artists for autistic children.
The composition responded to Videography by Kate Radford. It includes recordings of workshops undertaken with performers and producers to respond to visual, emotional and sensory stimuli.

The Artist-  A commission for Filskit Theatre Company

Featured on Earlid's 5th annual Liminal Sounds Listening vault exhibition: http://www.earlid.org/posts/evanesce/

A close relative retreated to New Zealand a decade ago. The pace of life is slower, and nature is everywhere. On our last visit, we camped on lake Manapouri in fjordland in the South Island. The dawn chorus was incredible. Bell birds, Tui, Grey Warblers and Fantails sang through the thin morning air and into my dreams.
We meet numerous ex-pats starting families, businesses and enjoying refuge from the overcrowding and pressures of European life.  The human population of New Zealand has doubled in the last 50 years 
But since humans came, the bird populations have decreased by almost 75%.
On arriving in the South Island in the 1770’s Captain Cook recorded the bird song as ‘deafening’.  
Now 153 species out of 200 are threatened with extinction. 
I have layered field recordings of the Manapouri dawn chorus to recreate how they might have sounded 250 years ago. The bell bird in particular, has a beautiful, almost metallic alien song.
The end of the piece returns to my original recording which reflects a stark, sad decline.
As humans retreat into nature, birds and other wildlife are forced into nonexistence.
Photo: Lake Manapouri, New Zealand

Manapouri Ghost Birds

Brutalist Dream Time Techno homage to the legendary artist TAKIS. 
Live set by Lou Barnell. 
Bookings: Info@loubarnell.co.uk

TAKIS

info@loubarnell.co.uk || @LouBarnell

Lou Barnell is a London born movement and sound artist. An explosion of material sonic experimentation, intense visuals and brutalist visceral choreography. Lou creates scores as physical traces with sensory tests and materials, extended vocal techniques, wearable sound-materials and biorhythmic sensors. Lou is currently undertaking a period of research and development into dreams, embodied listening and materials funded by Arts Council England
#womeninelectronicmusic #fieldrecordings #experimental #soundart #extendedvocals

Lou Barnell

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