For the Enclave Festival 2023 in Mexico, DC I was commissioned to collaborate with the amazing Mexican interdisciplinary artist and researcher of sound, Daniel Lara Ballesteros. This 13th edition of Enclave explored the theme of ACOUSTIC EMERGENCY POETICS: dialogues, sound and poetic interventions. Responding to the theme, we created an Audiovisual composition that us just […]
Infinity Kisses 23 is a 5:52min long sound piece that responds to Carolee Schneeman´s work of (almost) the same title, re-imagining the act of kissing that is presented in the original, though sound. Cats were of importance to the renowned performance artist, Carole Schneeman, throughout her life, as was her own body. It was therefore […]
Over the years Viv and Iris have explored their joined interest in improvisation and voice. Below are a few examples: 2013 – Composition “Who says banshees have no fun?” for MuseRole-women in experimental music, Italy. Listen here OnTheAirJukeBox 2019 – Composition “Brixton Lullaby” for Down to a Sunless Sea. Listen on bandcamp 2019 A short […]
The Listening Wall is a wall of curated scores for listening and sound related instruction scores. Within the exhibition space, these scores are also available as print-outs for audiences to take and experience at a time of their choosing. Some scores focus our attention on the experience of listening and the quality of the sound itself; others aim […]
“Breathing Through Wires”, is an improvised voice and wearable lo-fi electronics performance. This involves a head worn mic and a small hand-held speaker “by which sound is re-combined with body, re-focusing schizophonic experience” (Tahiroğlu et al., in press). The performance is part of Garrelfs’ longstanding interest in the relationship between human expressivity and technology […]
Iris Garrelfs performs live, often using her voice as raw material, which she transmutes into machine noises, choral works or “granules of electroacoustic babble and glitch, generating animated dialogues between innate human expressiveness and the overt artifice of digital processing” as the Wire Magazine put it.
That said, many performances also incorporate other sounds, and some also use images. A vital part of her performance work, be it using voice or using other source material, is improvisation and the incorporation of random elements, the ephemeral fragility and risk implied in giving up control to the moment, a sonic singularity. Of equal interest is a spatial experience, sound unbound, for which reason she prefers multi-channel set ups.
For more information on individual performance projects, click on the pictures below.
Find some general information on her vocal improvised performances here.
For upcoming live dates check here.
Just in time for International Women’s Day 2017, Jude Cowan Montague and myself created a film called Paw’s Off. It uses an improvisation by us two live on air at The News Agents, on Resonance FM during the woman’s march on 21st January 2017, responding to tweets and other media outlets. We’ve combined this with […]
Our performance at the Whitstable Biennale in June of this year is released by DIVAcontemporary as part of Whitstable 2016 :: live on the beach V[1] on bandcamp on October 1, 2016 For the performance, Tansy and I collected materials on the beach which we then improvised with. Audiences listened via headphone which created an […]
Site specific sonic post-Dada madness with Iris Garrelfs and Jude Cowan Montague. “Oddest moment was that I was complaining about the fact that I’d forgotten about the Dada event the previous day, then we rushed in to watch those women do that thingy…” About a performance at Linear Obsessional Live in the Park No.11.
An extract of my first ever duo with the excellent Poulomi Desai (modified sitar + electronics) from Salon des Refusés/Sonica FM in 2015 was released on the Finnish label Tavern Eightieth in spring 2016. The double CD is full of other superb artists and their music (including AGF, Richard Sanderson), all in aid of Alzheimer’s UK. Buy double CD here To buy the single bandcamp click […]
Otzi is an an audio-visual work developed for the MuseRuole Festival at Museion Museum for Modern and Contemporary Art in Bolzano/Italy, on 27th May 2016. It is inspired by the story of the Ötzi the ieceman, an extremely well-preserved natural mummy who was found buried in ice in the nearby Ötztal Alps (hence the name). His body and belongings are […]
Lauschen is a performance work by Iris Garrelfs for improvised voice, environment and listening cones. It was originally devised in 2016 specifically for Lausch II at Lewisham Art House, London, UK as a series curated by Rahel Kraft, but has since been performed elsewhere. Lauschen is a German term, meaning “close listening” or “eavesdropping”. The performance […]
Room 61 was a site-specific performance at the National Gallery, as part of Soundscapes Late. The event took place in Room 61 of the Sainsbury Wing (see floor plan) in September 2015. As a live response to images in these galleries, the piece includes growling lions, lute music, readings from a Middle Age treatise on painting and […]
Remote Listening is new project, which is still in development. It involves participants calling me on a mobile phone within a set timeframe (one week for example), and me describing my environment to them. I envisage this as a kind of one-on-one performance poetry kind of experience. Here is a very short and rough example […]
Eclipse is a site-specific performance commissioned by Radio Arts for Switched On at the Beaney Art Museum in Canterbury, UK. Juxtaposing the universe with mundane everyday life, the performance combines readings from Canterbury’s local newspapers (including personal ads) with sounds of the solar system with and musings about the recent solar eclipse. The following text was read as […]