Mixed by Ex-Partner and Joshua Lynn
Mastered by Remi Salvador

Rainbow Party / Media Poison

Yr Hwch Ddu Gwta, Chan urradh mi a-rithist.

Cutty Black Sow

Choke Point

CUD refers to the chewing-over-again of partly digested food eaten by ruminants (animals like cattle, sheep & goats). To ruminate is to think, or dwell on a thought repeatedly – as a creature throws up its meal only to chew it over again. 

CUD is a sonic collage intent on reanimating (& ruminating on) a range of ferally scavenged archival media: advertisements for Aotearoa’s meat, milk & farming products; radio cooking shows; queer local cinema; the violent semantics of authoring sound effects; & the hauntological grief of a dance only heard, not seen. The work seeks to explore relations between reproductive/nonreproductive & human/animal bodies, their associated technologies & byproducts through repurposing archival media. 

CUD seizes on what Mel Y. Chen refers to as ‘leakages’ between classifications of what is human & what is not, with an emphasis on the idea of “naturalness” & its other, the “unnatural” – a term frequently deployed in reference to queer sex & reproduction. CUD asks you to lean into the leakages, to reiterate & invert them – irrupting the smooth semiotic surface of naturalness’ normative containers.

The word ruminant is derived from the Latin rumen, meaning ‘throat’ – the site of both the voice, & the breath. The recorded singing voice featured at the end of CUD is that of the only Castrato singer ever recorded, Alessandro Moreschi, singing Tosti’s Ideale in 1902. The dancer you can hear panting & stomping is Douglas Wright, dancing Elegy, a piece made in 1993 for his friends who died of AIDS. Spliced together – with reverence –  across almost a century, they offer a surrogate lament regurgitated from a gender-bent throat.

CUD opens with an invitation to see, perhaps in line with Barthes’ dictum that to see well, you must close your eyes. I wonder then, if to hear well, one must close one’s ears, or perhaps lean into sounds of the errant, the monstrous, the distorted: the unideal. 



Ideale  (Tosti, 1882; translated from the Italian) 

I followed you like a rainbow of peace
 along the paths of heaven;
 I followed you like a friendly torch
 in the veil of darkness,
 and I sensed you in the light, in the air,
 in the perfume of flowers,
 and the solitary room was full
 of you and of your radiance.
 
 Absorbed by you, I dreamed a long time
 of the sound of your voice,
 and earth's every anxiety, every torment
 I forgot in that dream.
 Come back, dear ideal, for an instant
 to smile at me again,
 and in your face will shine for me
 a new dawn.
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Frances Libeau (they/them) is a queer Pākeha interdisciplinary artist. Their sonic compositions, sound designs, & writing feature across live, screen & digital platforms of contemporary music, fine art (film, sculpture & performance), film (feature & short), theatre & dance. Libeau’s work often explores the textural & semantic possibilities of storytelling through sonic collage of found materials & possibilities for queering sonic & compositional & archival practices.
https://iecrazy.com
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For more like this go to www.pyramidclub.org.nz

With thanks to Creative New Zealand for supporting this work

CUD - Frances Libeau

Live set at Wrought Material open studio and Ave Teth EP release.
Recorded from the desk.
Image credit: @shadestagramm

Wrought Material Set 25.2.23

Stony Beach

From a friend's beat up Corolla 
see the pylons of state highways.
I could put all my things in one
and inside the pylon I'd stay.

The distant roar of traffic
like the swellings of the sea,
would make wakefulness and dreams
align momentarily. 

I lit fires as a child.
Lynx Africa was my flame-thrower.
An amateur arsonist, 
but I'm still burning down the bridge they built from me to you
to stay warm and alone. 

When I pass into the next plane 
don't put a stone beside a grave
- burn my body by the lagoon 
of the North-Western motorway.
You can watch from Newton bridge
as my bones begin to switch 
from something into nothing, 
some kid'll say, "was she a witch?"

And remember me inaccurately,
edit out the bits I played the devil's advocate.

An amateur arsonist,
Hitler's jizz doesn't melt steel beams but our words do
to stay warm and alone. 

We shook off our coils to build a chain-link fence together
and wrapped our battered world in barbed wire forever. 
A place under the sun for me and you
where our territories have better stories than Earth's teenage tattoos.

An Amateur Arsonist

The Weatherboards Are the Skin

And the waters prevailed.

Farden

Insyn

Organs Informationized

AKB (Aotearoa & London)

ex-musician 

freezingworksmusic@gmail.com

Organs Informationized

eeling

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