Essential Blends Essential Blends (Adriana Minu & Kevin Leomo)

Diljeet Bhachu in conversation with Kevin Leomo

Episode Notes:

This episode is a conversation between Essential Blends host, Kevin Leomo, and musician, performer, researcher, and activist, Diljeet Bhachu.
Recorded in Glasgow, August 2022. Diljeet and Kevin discuss: exploring sound, relationship with and embodiment of your instrument, connecting with your instrument, physicality of playing; the concept of the whole self, unpacking all the layers in order to fit in and be a different person in different contexts; growing up with cultural difference, layers of awareness, sense of belonging, assimilation culture; parallel histories; layers of awareness, seeing and critically understanding race; enjoying the process of making music, not the product; coloniality and decolonising; positionalities, bringing lived experience into research and PhD work; teaching experiences; vulnerability; spoken word; what makes a creative practice; daytime performance, care.


Diljeet Bio:

Diljeet Bhachu is is an improvising flute player from Glasgow, Scotland. She is currently engaged in a long-term process of unlearning some of the limitations of her training, leaning into imperfection and process.  Her improvised playing has been described as “Stunning, transporting to dream realms of music and restfulness…” (Bell Lungs). Diljeet completed her PhD at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. It was during her doctoral research that she gained clarity on how race and colonialism are embedded in her life and her working contexts, following years of informal work and activism to address inequalities.

Diljeet has been writing music on and off since childhood, largely informally before being introduced to ‘composition’ as a concept in high school.  She is now engaging with this more pro-actively and formally, most recently writing pieces for the new Trinity College London Graded Exam Flute Syllabus for Exams from 2023 onwards.  She has plans to record an improvised EP in 2023, and is also developing a more composed concept album. Diljeet enjoys collaborating, and in particular working with poets both in live and recorded settings. She also performs regularly in Kapil Seshasayee’s live band, and features on both of his albums.

Diljeet has been a trade union activist for over a decade, alongside a portfolio career that has included freelance research, teaching in higher education, and being an arts producer. She co-founded the Scottish-Asian Creative Artists’ Network in 2017, to create space for Scottish artists with Asian heritage whose practices do not explicitly or directly draw on Asian artistic traditions, alongside those who do work within heritage traditions. Shortly after recording this podcast, Diljeet started working for the Musicians’ Union, where she is an Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Officer.

Mark Vernon's special mix for Essential Blends. A deep dive into his immersive audio world. 

Mark Vernon in conversation with Adriana Minu

Episode notes

Mark is a fascinating sound artist based in Glasgow with a artistic sensitivity uniquely attuned to archival and found recordings. In conversation with Adriana, Mark generously unfolded the journey of his practice, meandering through his visual arts background, art school training, pirate broadcasts, hospital residencies, the value of giving new lifes to lost voices, how music recordings sometimes end up in the most unexpected contexts and much more.

Mark Bio

In his sound works Mark explores concepts of audio archaeology, magnetic memory and nostalgia. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the re-appropriation of found sounds. A rich collection of domestic tape recordings; audio letters, dictated notes, answer-phone messages and other lost voices often find their way into his unorthodox soundworlds. These diverse elements are distilled into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, fixed media, installations and live performances.

A keen advocate of radio as an art form, he co-runs and curates Glasgow’s art radio station, Radiophrenia. He is an award winning radio producer who has produced programmes internationally for stations including Resonance FM, VPRO, Sound Art Radio, Radio Revolten, Deutschland Radio Kultur, Radio Cona, Kunstradio, Wavefarm, Radio Art Zone, RADIA and the BBC.

His solo music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Glistening Examples, Canti Magnetici, Flaming Pines, Misanthropic Agenda, Entr’acte, Gagarin, Calling Cards Publishing, Psyché Tropes, Granny, Persistence of Sound, 3Leaves and his own meagre resource imprint.

He performs regularly at venues and galleries in the UK, Europe and beyond including festival appearances at Full of Noises, Hideous Porta, Apologies in Advance, Delaware Road, Tectonics, Counterflows, Supernormal (UK), Radio Revolten (Germany), LUFF, SONOHR (Switzerland), Untape Me (Austria) Sonikas (Spain), Longueur d’ondes (France) and Soundtiago (Chile).

Weblinks:

Website:

http://meagreresource.com

Bandcamp:

https://markvernon.bandcamp.com

Soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/markvernon

Collaborations

Hassle Hound, Limelight Cordial, Lucky Bugs Win Prizes - https://staubgold.bandcamp.com/track/lucky-bugs-win-prizes

Run by Mark

With Monica Brown: Lights Out Listening Group

https://lightsoutlisteninggroup.wordpress.com

Radiophrenia

https://radiophrenia.scot

Places mentioned

Sura Medura - Shri Lanka residency place: http://suramedura.com/residencies/

PRIM Montreal: https://primcentre.org/en/our-program

Pieces that have made an impact or that have influenced Mark

Gavin Bryars - Jesus Blood

Negativland - over the edge / dense audio collages

Graham Lambkin - listening to listening

Luc Ferrari - anecdotal sound

Janek Schaefer - recorded delivery - conceptual sound work / audio voyeurism

Pure field recording - Chris Watson / Toshiya Tsunoda

Upcoming projects:

Callback Carousel

A Loop Within a Loop (Glasgow Underground)

Clock Radio

https://radioart.zone/sunday-10-july

Tracklist, with Lucy's comments

1: That Snow — a track using vocal samples of Charlotte Mundy from her recording of Three Voices by Morton Feldman. Charlotte is a really good friend/colleague of mine.

2: If he loves me — this is a “Goth n B” remix of Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” which I thought, when you really listen to the lyrics, sounds like a freakishly obsessed ex. It’s one of my first finished tracks, and I’m singing on it.

3: Give me your heart — this started from playing around with this little brass bowl that I own. I had a time where I made a daily exercise out of improvising with household objects as instruments, and on this object (which had previously held a bunch of keys) I wanted to strike it but didn’t want it to sound too harsh. I figured out that I could kind of spin a bouncy ball inside and it would bounce around and resonate the bowl. So the whole track sprang from that, recorded on my iPhone.

4: Sky (remix) — I really wanted to try my hand at remixing my namesake song, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” (by the Beatles). I wanted to capture the psychedelic quality of the original, as well as some of my favorite lyrics, and also the explosive and energetic tom-toms that abruptly transition into  the chorus. I loved expanding on that moment.

Summary:

This episode is a conversation between Essential Blends host Adriana Minu and performer, creator, and singer Lucy Dehgrae, calling in from New York.

Lucy is very vibrant; she takes the reins and launches into the convo. I really enjoyed her energy and breadth of knowledge and experience.

We end up talking about the voice, as expected, different types of performativities and presences and being comfortable with ourselves.

We also talk about patronage of the arts: celebrating that which is precious and cannot be sold; honesty, vulnerability, courage as artistic qualities; pressure that is put on men to work super hard and be with the grind; virtuosity in classical music, looking out externally for validation; the effect the cultures of classical music and rap music have on self-esteem and vocal paresis and healing.

Bio:

Lucy Dhegrae is a singer committed to changing and challenging how vocal music is perceived, performed and programmed. Hailed as an “adventurous mezzo-soprano” and “raconteur” (The New Yorker) known for her “vocal versatility and an omnivorous curiosity” (The New York Times), she moves easily between a broad variety of styles, and can be found “everywhere new music is being sung” (New York Classical Review). Dhegrae is also the founder and director of the boundary-pushing Resonant Bodies Festival (2013-2021), which was praised by The New York Times as “an annual highlight [that] gives some of the world’s most adventurous vocal artists full freedom.”  

During the 2019-20 season, Dhegrae was selected among WQXR's "20 for 20 Artists to Watch” as someone "redefining what classical music can be...in thrilling ways” (WQXR), and also received the Career Advancement Award from Dawn Upshaw at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s inaugural Women in Classical Music Symposium. As Artist in Residence at National Sawdust, Dhegrae chose to present a multi-concert project entitled The Processing Series, exploring trauma’s relationship to the voice. Ultrafizz, her duo with pianist Nathaniel LaNasa, also had residencies at both Yellow Barn (Putney, VT) and Princeton University. In February 2020, Dhegrae made her New York Philharmonic debut with a new work by Paola Prestini; and in March, Dhegrae made her 92Y debut singing George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill with Talea Ensemble.

Dhegrae is sought after as a collaborator and creator of a body of contemporary music that defies categorization of style or genre. Since 2013 she has been a public speaker with RAINN, the nation’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, sharing her story of vocal loss and trauma recovery. She has given several talks and keynotes about her journey to vocal wholeness, and currently is enveloped in her personal work and compositions using voice and electronics, as well as DJing in New York City.

Song of an intention

Performed by:
Emmanuelle Waeckerlé
Adriana Minu
Kevin Leomo

The poetic text score for voice(s) and instrument(s) proposes a lose structure and a situation for exploring through sounds subtle shift of attention and awareness of being one, of being two, of occupying that space between us while eluding to the romantic ideal and impossibility of ever achieving total unity or intimacy with another. The title is a sentence from Luce Irigaray’s book To be Two (Athlone press 2000), a feminist critique of gendered subjectivity, proposing a culture of  ‘between two’ as opposed to the culture of the One.

The text score was inspired by a collaboration with photographer and performance artist Manuel Vason, a commission for Photography and Culture  Volume 11, 2018 – Issue 2: The Theatre of Photography : Becoming One : a duologue in practice, a piece of experimental writing and a series of performative photographs (2017)  in which “We became one in writing and in breathing, in real time and in photographic time.“