FIRST BIRTH is the opening instalment of a new multi-part audio work created to accompany Alice Channer's sculptures 'Ammonite' and 'Ammonite' (2019). FIRST BIRTH excavates the many layers of ancient and present day production processes embedded in the sculptures' pleated skins, occupying warm shallow waters, expansive sands, rock pools and motorway sidings, with voices passing between human, non-human and elemental bodies.

Written, composed and produced by SHELL LIKE. Voiced by Madeleine Stack, Amy Lay-Pettifer, Fer Boyd, Alice Channer and Leyla Pillai. Visual by SHELL LIKE.

FIRST BIRTH, 2021

This recording was made in Adnan’s apartment on Rue Madame in Paris, in November 2018. It captures a brief, intense encounter with voice and presence - a flow of fragments, spoken like a soul soaring close to the Earth. Stopping occasionally to enunciate and re-enunciate, Adnan stares reality in the eyes, moving between the strobing light of imagination, reality and mortality. 

'Surge' was published by Nightboat Books in 2018. This recording was made for SHELL LIKE Listening Event 5: Our Fuming Lips Make A New Mirage at Eastside Projects, Birmingham as part of 'This is the Gallery and the Gallery is Many Things'. Special thanks to Gavin at Eastside Projects for offering the connection with Etel.

Etel Adnan, I Repeat (Extract from 'Surge'), 2018

A collaborative audio sketch written and produced by Amy Lay-Pettifer and Fer Boyd between 9-25 May 2020 for broadcast on Montez Press Radio.

An exchange of libidinous fragments which feel through the possibilities, textures, and sensations of remote collective listening - how voices might form repairs in the sky, aerate the skin as a plane of sand, or suddenly become visible via the magical oddness of super-extended limbs. Rather than moving via the singular opening of the ear or mouth, voices writhe in the multiple pores of a super-extended body mass, which listens and breathes through a moist shield of skin.

WORMS ON THE BEACH, 2020

listening events curated by amy lay-pettifer and fer boyd 
www.shell-like.com

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