From 2nd-6th February 2015, during a residency for Tate Britain’s Radio City Season, I developed the Listening Room, a space for visitors to bring me objects and their stories around the theme of “hearing”. These might be pictures, stones, sticks, in fact anything imaginable! I was at hand to record the stories and I later created a 4-channel […]
Breathing Through Wires is an album of live improvised and processed voice performances, recorded in the UK between 2012 and 2014. Some were recorded through the mixing desk, others in the room. The titles refer to either event or venue. It was released on net label of the year 2014 Pan Y Rosas Discos. Expect to […]
Dance of the Mosquitos is a track made for the compilation”Two Minutes Left” on Linear Obsessional. All tracks are exactly two minutes long, and all used microphones somewhere along the line. As you probably have guessed, mine is made from voice sounds. Listen at https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/track/dance-of-the-mosquitoes A bit more about the track: Dance of the Mosquitoes was created in response to […]
I am currently in the process of developing Morse Code Choir, a Dreamlands Commission from Radio Arts. It is due in late January 2015 and will be broadcast on Radio Reverb, Resonance FM, Phonic FM, BCB, Radio Papesse, WGXC (90.7-FM) and Wave Farm Radio (1620-AM). Click here for more.
Unwitting scores is a performance commissioned for Forms of Ventriloquism curated by Maria Papadomanolaki. It took place at IMT Gallery, on 24.7.2014.
For Forms of Ventriloquism Iris Garrelfs re-interprets the relationships between puppeteer and dummy, performer and score, by “throwing her voice” (as the act of ventriloquizing is also known) and giving expression to another time, another place, and another’s experience. These were relayed by visual and textual recordings of the initial activities. Iris Garrelfs now zooms into their fragmented traces, which become unwitting scores and prompts to a performative transposition of place.” For more information, click here
Bedroom Symphonies is an album of eight compositions made from voice practice sessions during a number of tours and residencies.So, imagine me sitting on a hotel bed, or friend’s sofa, laptop on the night table with a head microphone plugged straight into it and you won’t be too far from reality. As the practice microphone wasn’t […]
Brixton Lullaby is an extract from a collaborative live improvised studio session at Clifton Mansions, Brixton, between Viv Corringham and Iris Garrelfs, using voice and electronics. The original recordings were made in autumn of 2007, the edit was made in spring 2014 and published as part of the temporal benefit release For Syria on Linear […]
Stone Table is an improvised performance work for locally collected stones and an amplified metal table. It was developed for Sonic cueB Festival in London, curated by Luca Nasciuti. The first performance took place on 24/3/2014. I spent the afternoon collecting stones in the local area – mostly in Hilly Fields – which where then used in the performance […]
Find a 2-min contribution to Button Box on Linear Obsessional which contains 46 re-workings of Richard Sanderson’s recent album Air Buttons. It’s called eating through wires and you know why when you download it for free here.
Fellow sound artist and photographer Tansy Spinks and I have been selected for a collaborative residency at Wimbledon Space as part of ACTS RE-ACTS Festival, organised by Wimbledon College of Arts to set up a debate about contemporary performance in fine art and theatre. It will take place from 25/2/14-26/3/14 and Tansy and I will have fun exploring collaborative, site specific sound performance through objects and improvisation. We played with similar ideas during a one-day workshop last year (which made it into my piece Object and Process), and it will be very interesting to see where this may lead to.
You can find the residency blog here.
Introduction Object and Process began life as one-to-one workshops with three fellow artists, Tansy Spinks, Mark-Peter Wright and Dan Scott, trying of get a feel for how sound artists interact with objects through improvisation. The idea to the first part of Object and Process was prompted by the first practitioner in the series, Tansy Spinks, asking if I considered using the […]
Multilogue was developed as multi-channel sound installation using a selection of interview materials conducted with artists such as Aura Satz, David Toop, Trevor Wishart and many more. It presents a multi-angled dialogue, a blend of views from which the piece emerges at their intersection. The title derives from a contraction of the words ’multi’ and ‘dialogue’. […]
A 9-channel sound piece made for the BeOpen Sound Portal as part of Sounding Space
By Iris Garrelfs with Charlotte Rose Desborough, Robbie Judkins and Peter McKerrow
Sound Portal Designer Stephen Philips said in an interview that the main inspiration for the design of the structure was Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Coincidentally London College of Communication holds the Stanley Kubrick archive and when combined with a love of sci-fi in general this seemed the perfect embarkation point for the sound artists’ sonic explorations.
Remembering Worlds builds on these influences and creates a journey in sound and space. The piece weaves together memories from the Kubrick Inner Circle oral history project at the archive with more personal ones to the piece’s creators, intersected with sounds that primarily live in cultural imagination: those of alien landings, titan battles and human exploration.
The result is a playful narrative that comments on perceptions of imagining future and past, whilst folding these into the act of listening.
Here a stereo compression of the installation
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