Like so many things I both know and don't know
Goldsmiths, University of London (UK)
<http://dx.doi.org/10.12801/1947-5403.2017.09.01.12>
In 2014, I was commissioned to make a new work for Survival Kit Festival, Umeå, Sweden. The outcome, I begin alone in this action: a series of sounding zones, was a number of outdoor long duration sounding performances in the city and surrounding rural area. In eight different locations, I undertook a series of eight-hour DJ performances with a bespoke and portable, self-powered sound system, and a selection of domestic playback equipment. This site-specific set of actions proposed to explore bodily endurance in performance; the socio-cultural role of the soundsystem as a viable tool to create what Bey termed the “temporary autonomous zone” (1985); the fringes or limits of what skills and sites might be considered DJ practice. I have continued to investigate site-specificity in DJing through collaborative practice; in 2015 artists Ruthie Woodward, Fran Perry and I formed the ensemble, The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe. In our performances we also worked without mains electricity[1] and “off stage” at festivals and gigs on the UK DIY scene. We developed interests in blurring the lines between experimental live improvisation and more traditional mixing practices; using our live sung voices in our mixes; and investigating plurivocal and collectivised structures inspired by various moments in feminist activist histories.[2]
This neatly worded opening paragraph makes it sound like I have some sort of sense of what I was doing, what I am doing. I use tidy academic signposting language like “proposed to explore”, and I casually reference “experimental live improvisation” and the “UK DIY scene” as if they are tangible, unexploded things that don't require interrogation. I use the word DJ wildly as validation or affirmation of my status as one. I suggest a linear narrative where there is none.
The artist, scholar and founder of Ladyz in Noyz, Marlo De Lara, recently described her practice as “watching sound unfold in multiple acts of embodied non-linear story telling” (2016). There is also an Andra McCartney quote I like, about the act of sounding being analogous to “a mariner’s slow and careful navigation through unfamiliar waters” (quoted in Rogers 2010: 18).
What is presented here is a collection of artifacts, evidence of a porous and incomplete “working through” of my relationship to the two aforementioned projects, and in turn their relationship to a perceived field of feminist action. Most often documentation of process notes and questions in the form of field notes and partially transcribed conversations, but also sometimes more abstract imaginings and responses to questions and answers which are “not quite yet”.[3]
...
I begin alone in this action: Survival Kit Gallery Documentary (Busby 2014)
...
20/9/14, Kungsgatan och Pilgatan (the main route through town)
i travelled from the bottom of the bike bridge to the gallery22/9/14, Gathörnet Västra Strandgatan (a street in town, near the river and some ex-industrial buildings)
the night before the temperature dropped suddenly
by performance time the wind was high and so weather moved through quickly
it felt like I experienced all the weather the city offered on this day
i kept taking off and putting on layers, by the end of the day I was huddled under a bridge to shelter from a snow shower
24/9/14, Naturvetarstråket, Ålidhem (a park and playground)
this day I really enjoying finding spots to sit quietly and be with the sound I was handling, probably the first time felt in the zone for extended periods of time
various children came to see me and examine extensively my equipment and bike cart, climbing trees and on rocks
i wondered if I disturbed their playing, and if I had the right to be here
25/9/14, Skulpturparken Aktrisgränd (a sculpture park and open wooded area, near residences)
there was a turn today, an oppressive loneliness characterised the performance
i had to deal with the sun setting and working in the dark, in a more rural setting, for the first time
i was terrified even though I knew I must be safe[4]
28/9/14, Nydalasjön (a lake)
the first time it rained and I had no real shelter
i dropped a record player in the wet sand, I think the needle’s still okay
1/10/14, Grillplatsen mitt i Gimmonässpåren och olika platser i skogen (a forest)
this location was far and hard to get to, and I wanted to go into the forest, not sit on the edges
i found a hut at the end of the day, and my friend organised a little party of people to camp there with me, to listen to my mix in the final few hours
we ate sausages, it was kind of them
this was an unsettling location again, particularly in the darkness
i don't really understand this uncontrolled reaction, i’m not exactly doing something that puts myself at risk, so it seems melodramatic to feel scared
i guess the courage that is part of this self-imposed methodology, manifests somehow in not just the endurance but actually channeling a focus to mix given the conditions, and my own feelings about them
it doesn't always work but I guess failure is a part of any performance, or at least any process
...
Today, during her last sounding zone performances here in Umeå, Lisa Busby's bespoke soundsystem died. This event occurred 2 hours and 20 minutes into this [sic] 8th and final performance. Lisa will be continuing to walk her planned route, visiting each proposed zone in turn with any equipment that has survived. In this alternate sounding zone performance, Lisa will deposit records and tapes in each location. Her route is the cycle road and along the river from Sofiehem to the Bildmuseet Arts Campus.
...
The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe (Nomadic Female DJ Troupe—Supernormal 2015)
...
Arrange your three bodies into various configurations that form interesting shapes for the camera, but obscure your face.
Triangles are nice, but also try stacking up vertically and horizontally.
Figure 1. Nomadic Female DJ Troupe promotional photography (2015). Photo: John Harries.
...
Ruthie Woodward: Sometimes, for me, I had to find a spot where I was comfortable, and then I would have to move every now and then. There is quite a lot of discomfort for me in our practice because of sitting in weird places or lots of walking around carrying heavy things. I’m not 100% sure why that is relevant or why I think that's interesting... [pause]
Lisa Busby: But we continue to do it for some reason.
Woodward: And we do it to ourselves.
Busby: Yeah, we self impose.
Francine Perry: We’ve never actually played on a stage have we?
Busby: Okay. It was designed for the festivals wasn't it? What does it mean now, to be nomadic? I think often it means unpowered, and that’s interesting.
Woodward and Perry [simultaneous]: Yeah.
...
Woodward: The fact that it’s an all female band will always be a thing.
Busby: Yeah but we’re foregrounding it even further by putting it in the title.
...
Lisa—website
Fran—logo
Ruthie—tech spec
All:
1. Buying battery powered fairy lights, ponchos, umbrellas, megaphones, mini amps
2. Sewing straps for box backpacks and trays
3. Rehearsing
...
I remember we talked about performances being sonically spatialised using our bodies. There might be a “basecamp” with a central and loudest sound emitter, but around this we three could walk and sound using smaller devices to act as orbital or at least moving sound sources. This idea of roaming in orbit feels interesting to me, unusual at least. It makes me think of something between topographical maps and those Cage scores that are just intersecting circles. Having something like that dictate or map literally sounding paths for us to follow whilst mixing, and the sonic experience being constantly moving and changing in space as our paths cross and diverge, undulating proximities. I wonder why we never did that?
And then what if you did that not in some sort of spacious, gorgeous landscape or open area—you did it in a crowd, or at an existing gig or something. I’m not sure I’d ever have the courage to do that. That feels quite hardcore.
...
Imagine the tempo and the motivational narration by Rosemary Conley from your “Slimobility Exercise Tape”.
Adopt boat pose until power resumes
Performed March 18, 2016
...
Lisa Busby: I’m really concerned—so in my abstract I was like oh, to what extent is a nomadic stance—so to what extent is using unusual technology or, not unusual technologies, but like opting out of mainstream technologies and mainstream settings [pause] is a deliberate feminist stance of opting out because those things are associated with a sort of masculinised narrative of technology, of everything, of fucking performance, of everything.
John Harries: So there is a valid question to ask about, actually, about every micro-decision that happens in the music as well. Whether those decisions are addressing a similar kind of opt in/out dichotomy?
Busby: How would they be?
Harries: Well, as you say for example, the decision to sing non-verbally, to sing as a texture, when that decision emerges in an improvisation, in a performance, is there an aspect of that which is about a will to opt out of what’s expected?
Busby: Even if we don’t know it.
Harries: Even if you don't know it, yeah.
Harries: Conversely, in a kind of what might otherwise be an experimental music or free improvisation setting, is the decision to drop a beat in the middle of it an opting in, or opting out?
Busby: It’s an opting in if you think of it as dance music, but it’s kind of an opting out if you think of it as... [pause]
Harries: [picks up] ... experimental music, both of which scenes are potentially equally gendered and hampered by sets of preconceptions.
...
Busby: And then when the main acts came on people loved it. It did feel like people really knew what was going on, it was like this is a band and this is a band of electronic musicians who are making bangin’ music—we can all dance now, great.
And, that thing you were saying about “it’s really confrontational when you come outside of the confines of stage, for an audience”. I feel like the exact opposite, I feel like if I was on a stage I’d feel really secure cause people couldn’t really see what I was doing. Whereas I feel like putting myself [pause]... so there’s a mystique there’s a performance mystique of not knowing really how these sounds are generated. But when you put yourself on the floor, in some ways it's a really vulnerable or submissive position arguably. Because anyone could literally walk over and kick all your shit over, but not even in that aggressor/vulnerable position—you’re literally opening up your whole methodology, you’re totally demystifying a methodology. You’re basically saying look this is what we’ve got. This shit, this pile of shit that doesn't really work is what we've got, and this is what we’re doing, you can see literally exactly how complicated or simple our actions are at any given time, you can see when some of us aren’t doing stuff.
Harries: Yeah but that in itself is confrontational.
Busby: Why?
Harries: It’s vulnerable, right, but it’s not submissive, actually. It’s vulnerable yes as you're physically exposed, but it’s not submissive because it’s actually kind of saying, in a way it’s sort of saying I don't care about what you think about what I’m doing, I don’t care about pretending to make this into something that you might want it to be. So that’s confrontational. It’s also confrontational in the sense of, um, just the fact it deliberately is not engaging with that kind of mystique of musical performance. Don't forget that’s what a lot of people like about performance, that's what a lot of people want to happen when they go to a gig, is to watch somebody and be really impressed by the magic that’s happening onstage. Which is why The Knife thing is confrontational, it’s why that Jenny Hval gig was confrontational. It’s that sense of going like—you want me to be a rock star, well fuck you, that’s not what’s happening here. And even if it’s really fun, it’s really inclusive, it’s really democratizing, it still does have that element to it I think.
...
As points of anchor for you the reader I now present the following list of contextualizing ideas and questions that I have either tried to untangle through research, or am tacitly aware of. I have tried to present them in a coherent reading order, so they may inform one another as you proceed, but do be aware these are thoughts in progress to be considered, not any sort of argument. For the same reason, no conclusions are presented.
These projects could be read as having what Deborah Withers calls “strategic affinities” (2014) with “the fragmented legacy” (2013: 3) of other feminist activity in sound and music. But I and we[6] didn’t design it that way, although it is fair to say that I and we were aware of what Withers calls the “intangible cultural heritage” of feminist action (2015). Or to rearrange that—we were intangibly aware of the cultural heritage of feminist action. Furthermore, I and we struggled day to day with what Holly Ingleton discusses perceptively with relation to the Her Noise project: Joan Scott’s assertion of “the need to both accept and refuse sexual difference”, and “not as strategies of opposition, but the constitutive elements of feminism itself” (in Ingleton 2012: 49–50) So both of my own projects are characterised, for me at least, by complicated dualities of at once knowing and not knowing, of deliberately and simultaneously articulating and obfuscating.
I realised that as an improvising practitioner I encountered a similar field of negotiations when I read Tracey McMullen’s interview with Judith Butler, “Improvisation within a field of constraint” (2016: 21–33). The discussion highlights the possibility of improvisational gesture or action to be volitional, but also or alternatively relational, nonconceptual; and furthermore examines improvisation as a tool in arts making but also in social and behavioural settings.
I am improvising musician.
I am improvising feminist.
I had felt liberated by my experience of musical, sonic, or bodily improvisation as an open site for multiple ways of doing and knowing, but had never before aligned my relationship to my own feminist gesture as similarly improvisational until reflecting on these projects.
A number of possible strategies inherent in these works could be understood as challenging or opting out of hegemonic, and masculine, narratives and spaces of technology and technological making—particularly when considering dominant or mainstream DJ cultures.[7]
1. The use of domestic, non-professional, obsolete, portable, hacked, and/or hand made equipment.
2. When working solo, a move away from the dual deck set up, and when collaborating, the continuously collectivized nature of the sound making (where anywhere up to nine channels may be live). In both instances, sequential positioning largely gives way to an unusually dense layering of sound.
3. The audible tension between rhythmically stable dance music and arrhythmic improvised music.
4. The nomadic stance—embodied in embracing outdoor or other unexpected locations, un-staged performances when in more traditional venues, and the decision to restrict ourselves to battery power only.
I reserve the right to define these sounding actions as feminist, but refuse any implication that in doing so they become only feminist actions.
It is worth considering, then, that these strategies could be seen as opting out of something other than gendered musical constructs, and indeed opting in to one or more other things? Much of what I and we do—methodologies, instruments and resulting sound—might be considered the bread and butter of lo-fi, glitch, noise, free improv or experimental music(s). Marie Thompson (2016: 97–8) observes that experimental music has a long-standing concern with countering the traditional and that this complicates the position of counter-hegemonic activities as straightforwardly, unequivocally or exclusively “feminist”. Most interestingly though, citing Cox (2015: 98) she posits that “experimental music itself could be conceptualised as ‘feminine’, in as much as it frequently prioritises fluidity, messiness and dynamism” and you do not necessarily need to identify as female to be understood as generating “feminised noise”. Note that feminised should not be uncritically equated to feminist; Thompson points out the feminised may impede patriarchal structures but can exist within them.
So, to return to my previous point—my knowing and not knowing—improvising as a musician and feminist has led me to a nexus of sites; I and we practice in some sort of liminal space where simple notions of opting in or out become complicated within a mobile set of strategies and resulting soundings that present multiple positions within contextual layers. I and we are not EDM DJs, nor are we free improvisers—both worldviews come to bear and yet this is not an argument either for some sort of post-identity or simplistic “genre-mashing” position. I and we may be both audibly inhabiting and rejecting different performance and sounding gestures, and the resistance may lie somewhere in the making visible cross-contextually.
I and we vocalise within mixes. In The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe this is characterized thusly—lyrics are improvised and non-narrative when used; non-verbal vocal sounding is as common as text-led or melodic singing; no single person takes the role of lead vocalist; vocalising is often collective harmonisation, textural, fragmentary, heavily processed; vocalising is almost always spontaneous; and crucially singing does not necessarily stop us engaging with other mix actions. It is obvious, but nonetheless valuable, to point out that this may be one more example of our simultaneous “inhabiting and rejecting” strategy, the “making visible” I outline above.
The following readings of the use of our voices in this way might also be worth reflecting upon:
1. We are not vocalists that appear on tracks, or sing live with a DJ. We are DJing and singing. The value may be less to do with the content of the vocalizing, and more the fact we are doing it at all.
2. It could present a flattened, non-hierarchical framework for operation, one that focuses on collectivity rather than a competitive “DJ battle” stance.
3. It may represent one of many resistance techniques women in the sonic arts and electronic music have and continue to use to challenge historic and sociocultural stereotypes (Lane 2016). Stereotypes that manifest in both representations of women’s voices in sound and music filtered through a masculine perception (Kretowicz 2012) and the exclusion and invisibility of women in these fields.[8]
Vulnerability is present in a number of ways in these performances: in the lone female body in public and often isolated spaces, and in the un-staged, ground-level performance setting that allows for the demystifying of creation of sound. This making visible of vulnerability is inextricably tied to a sense of refusal or confrontation, though. Tara Rogers notes that many of the female artists she encountered in her Pink Noises project, “cultivate technological sophistication in their work, but stake out philosophical positions that run counter to using dominant techno-scientific priorities of precision and control as ends in themselves” (2010: 8). I wonder if our visible active bodies in space, in relation to our instruments and the audience, present a physical enactment of such philosophical positioning.
A Scottish artist based in London, Lisa Busby is a composer, vocalist, DJ and Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. She performs and composes with bands The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe, Rutger Hauser and previously Sleeps in Oysters, as well as working independently as a solo artist. She is particularly interested in using playback media as instruments, but also works in text based score, installation and site specific performance. lisabusby.com.
Bey, Hakim. 1985. “T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”. <http://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html> (Accessed 17 July 2014).
Cox, Christoph. 2005. “A la recherché d’une musique feminine”. In Her noise, ed. Lina Dzuverovic & Anne Hilde Neset, 9–14. Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Forma.
Giulia Damiani and Barbara Mahiknecht. 2016. “(Un)Wanted Proximity”. Goldsmiths, University of London. Potatoes and Stones Art Research Symposium.
Marlo De Lara. 2016. “Ladyz in Noyz”. Goldsmiths, University of London. Doing Sonic Cyberfeminisms: Strategies of Sonic Resistance. Panel Event.
Farrugia, Rebekah. 2012. Beyond the Dance Floor: Female DJs, Technology and Electronic Dance Music Culture. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect.
Ingleton, Holly. 2012. “Her Noise: Identifying Feminist Strategies”. Reflections on Process in Sound 1: 44–51.
Gadir, Tami. 2016. “Resistance or Reiteration? Rethinking Gender in DJ Cultures”. Contemporary Music Review 35(1): 115–29. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176767>.
Kretowicz, Steph. “Comment: Gendered Production and the Artists who are Vocal About it”. Dummy. 18 December 2012. <http://www.dummymag.com/features/comment-gendered-production-and-the-artists-who-are-vocal-about-it> (Accessed 10 October 2014).
———. “Trends of 2013: Let’s Talk about Gendered Production, Baby”. Dummy. 5 December 2013. <http://www.dummymag.com/features/trends-of-2013-gendered-production-vocal-processing-planningtorock-sophie> (Accessed 10 October 2014).
Lane, Cathy. 2016. “Why Not Our Voices?” Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 20: 96–110. (Accessed 18 November 2016). <https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2016.0006>.
McCartney, Andra. 2000. “Sounding Places with Hildegard Westerkamp”. Ph.D. Dissertation, York University.
McMullen, Tracey. 2016. “Improvisation within a Scene of Constraint: An Interview with Judith Butler”. In Negotiated Moments: Improvisation, Sound and Subjectivity, ed. Gillian Sidall and Ellen Waterman, 21–33. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Rodgers, Tara. 2010. Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Scott, Joan W. 1996. Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.
Thompson, Marie. 2016. “Feminised Noise and the ‘Dotted Line’ of Sonic Experimentalism”. Contemporary Music Review 35(1): 85–105. (Accessed 2 August 2016). <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1176773>.
Withers, Deborah M. 2013. “Re-enacting Process: Temporality, Historicity and the Women’s Liberation Music Archive”. International Journal of Heritage Studies 7(8): 688–701. <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2013.794745>.
———. 2014. “Strategic Affinities: Historiography and Epistemology in Contemporary Feminist Knowledge Politics”. European Journal of Women's Studies 22(2): 129–42. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506814551759>.
———. 2015. “Intangible Cultural Heritage and the Women's Liberation Music Archive”. In Sites of Popular Music Heritage: Memories, Histories, Places, ed. Sarah Cohen, Rob Knifton, Marion Leonard and Les Roberts, 125–39. London: Routledge.
Busby, Lisa. 2014. “I begin alone in this action: Survival Kit Documentary”. Vimeo. Uploaded on 23 September 2014.
<https://vimeo.com/106976301> (Accessed 11 August 2017).
“Nomadic Female DJ Troupe—Supernormal 2015”. Vimeo. Uploaded on March 2017.
<https://vimeo.com/209370155> (Accessed 11 August 2017).
[1] Power supplied from the grid to homes, offices, etc.
[2] In both projects the sound making spaces I and we created were advertised or known to be open to participation. It was an exciting challenge and experience, one that yielded successes and failures, but it is not the focus of this text.
[3] This phrase emerged from the 2016 Goldsmiths Art Research Symposium Potatoes and Stones(see Damiani & Mahiknecht 2016) and one that I felt a particular affinity with as a description of process-led methodologies and enactments of working.
[4] I understood, rationally, that I was undertaking relatively safe activities in a relatively safe environment (and by this I mean I was statistically very unlikely to come to any physical harm for any reason, including attacks from other people). Nonetheless, my bodily and emotional experience was one of fear that I could not control or define. I am distantly aware that this “fearfulness” felt by women in public spaces has been explored by gender theorists. Like so many things I both know and don't know, the details or complexities of this shared knowledge I could not recount, like something partially recorded to tape but now lost in layers of overdubs and hiss.
[5] Original message posted on Swedish social media and translated by the author.
[6] The “we” referred to here is specifically the members of ensemble The Nomadic female DJ Troupe, and I use the phrase “I and we” to make distinctions between or correlate actions of my own in my solo practice and of the group.
[7] For contextualizing writing on DJ culture as a male dominated space see Farrugia (2012) and Gadir (2016).
[8] For contextualizing writing on women’s use of the voice in sonic arts see Lane (2016), and in electronic dance music culture see Kretowicz (2012, 2013).