Live soundtrack to a live film. Greg Pope operates two slide projectors and a hand-cranked shutter (all of which is contact-mic'ed). Voicehandler operates electronics, percussion, and voice.

Voicehandler+Greg Pope "Celluloid"

William S. Burrough's 1959 novel Naked Lunch depicts man as a product of incessant cultural influences and biological necessities. Voicehandler's score is built from verbatim quotations from the book – rife with sonic imagery, descriptions of its own structure, and hallucinatory scenarios.

This book spill off the page in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas, medley of tunes and street noises, farts and riot yips and the slamming steel shutters of commerce, screams of pain and pathos and screams plain pathic, copulating cats and outraged squawk of the displaced bullhead, prophetic mutterings of brujo in nutmeg trance, snapping necks and screaming mandrakes, sigh of orgasm, heroin silent as dawn in the thirsty cells, Radio Cairo screaming like a berserk tobacco auction, and flutes of Ramadan fanning the sick junky like a gentle lush worker in the grey subway dawn feeling with delicate fingers for the green folding crackle...

I am a recording instrument.

Borges' “The Library of Babel” (first published in 1941) describes an infinite library containing every possible permutation of the alphabet and orthographic symbols within books of a specific format. The inhabitants of this library struggle in various ways to derive meaning from this infinite sea of text that is their universe. Voicehandler's score comprises a number of pages fitting the format described in the story.

Man, the imperfect librarian, may be the work of chance or of malevolent demiurges; the universe, with its elegant endowment of shelves, of enigmatic volumes, of indefatigable ladders for the voyager, and of privies for the seated librarian, can only be the work of a god.

mi falible  mano

“The End” (1953) is Jorge Luis Borges' response to Martín Fierro, an epic poem by the Argentine writer José Hernández. In a famous episode of the poem, Fierro provokes a duel of honor with a black gaucho and then kills him in the ensuing knife fight. In “The End” the black gaucho's brother finally meets Fierro for a duel, after waiting seven years in a store, passing the hours playing his guitar.

There is an hour of the afternoon when the plain is on the verge of saying something. It never says it, or perhaps it says it infinitely, or perhaps we do not understand it, or we understand it and it is as untranslatable as music.

a meager labyrinth

Knut Hamsun's Hunger (1890) describes the unraveling mind of a starving man with an emphasis on his relationship to the city and society of Kristiania (present-day Oslo). Voicehandler's score depicts this relationship between city and protagonist with a series of graphic panels that indicate interactions of playing styles to be performed by two improvisers. 

It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiania, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him. . . .

empty and without pain

Watunna is the creation story and epic history of the Yekuana, or Makiritare, people living along the Upper Orinoco River of Venezuela.

The woman and the man dreamed that God was dreaming about them.
God was singing and clacking his maracas as he dreamed his dream in a tobacco smoke, feeling happy, but shaken by doubt and mystery.
The Makiritare Indians know that if God dreams about eating, he gives fertility and food. If God dreams about life, he is born and gives birth.
In their dream about God's dream, the woman and the man were inside a great shining egg, singing and dancing and kicking up a fuss because they were crazy to be born. In God's dream happiness was stronger than doubt and mystery. So dreaming, God created them with a song:
“I break this egg and the woman is born and the man is born. And together they will live and die. But they will be born again. They will be born and die again and be born again. They will never stop being born, because death is a lie.”
(from Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire, 1982)

soñando

Mare Island is fascinating for both its natural beauty and its abandoned, decaying military buildings. Our piece exploits the acoustical extremes of these two elements to highlight the uneasy balance between the natural and the manmade in this place. The heavy implications of war and military are made tangible by the heavy acoustics of the munitions magazine; the wide-open acoustics of the natural world stand in stark contrast. We are working with mutated traces of our own live performance, paralleling the rebirth of wild nature on the island, and its erosional effect on the abandoned buildings. Consider the military history of the drum, the song of the bird.

Jacob Felix Heule: percussion
Danishta Rivero: voice

Feb 15, 2015. Re:Sound Migration. Mare Island Shoreline Heritage Preserve. Vallejo, CA.

Mare Island (excerpt)

Live at the Lab, San Francisco. April 2016.

Floaters 3, pt. 1

Floaters 3, pt. 2

Floaters 2

live 2016 September 10 at Godwaffle Noise Pancakes, Noisebridge, San Francisco

Godwaffle Noise Pancakes

documentation of full piece with video: https://vimeo.com/236815053

Mosswood, a site specific expanded cinema work, explored the space in which it was presented(Mosswood Chapel), bringing the viewer into a meditation on the cycle of life. This 27-minute work was created by Kerry Laitala with live sound performed by Voicehandler (Danishta Rivero and Jacob Felix Heule). All of the black and white material in this memento mori was hand-processed and some material was solarized. This dual 16mm projector work used home movie footage from the 1940's intercut with color images that Laitala shot 20 years ago, merged with footage shot at the former Mosswood Mortuary to create a kind of psychogeography.

This work was inspired in part by the writings, videos and general philosophy of Caitlin Doughty.

Mosswood (excerpt)

Battery Alexander is a site-specific performance and sound installation that was realized November 12, 2017 at Battery Alexander, Marin Headlands, California -- an outdoor site in the remains of a former military mortar pit. The piece was active for about two hours for the audience, and random park visitors, to come and go as they desired. For the full duration, we continually performed a text score on voice and percussion with specific intentions for improvising based on the history and present of the space. Our performance was rooted in listening and contextualized by the site.

In the weeks preceding our performance, we recorded natural and human sounds from the area of Battery Alexander -- an archive of local observations. We deployed numerous small speakers throughout the site, and played back these field recordings with an aleatoric Max patch. We also mixed in live signals from shotgun mics assisting us in scanning the soundscape. A natural sound environment augmented with traces of past sounds and magnified live sounds.

Our environment affects what sounds we manifest and how they are perceived. This is true of our work in general, and this piece was intended to emphasize this relationship.

Battery Alexander

light from another light

May 25

June 1

June 8

William Burrough's 1959 novel depicts man as a product of incessant cultural influences and biological necessities. Voicehandler's score is built from verbatim quotations from the book – ripe with sonic imagery, descriptions of its own structure, and hallucinatory scenarios.

Naked Lunch

Jacob Felix Heule & Danishta Rivero

Voicehandler plays intuitive, incantatory music grounded in the most primitive and somatic instruments -- the voice and percussion -- juxtaposed with contemporary, disembodied electronics. We situate ourselves in our physical and social environment through our music. Our improvisations are shaped by their setting and context, and we use site-specific installations to more deeply experience spaces. We deconstruct song forms in relation to mythology and literature to explore our humanity and the shifting discourse surrounding it.

voicehandler

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