Drowning in the Weight of Your Expectations

This piece was written in collaboration with the French feminist collective, Fair_Play. Four artists (Sage Pbbbt, Zineb Soulaimani, Laryssa Kim, and Carol Robinson) created banks of sounds and enlisted up to 10 other female and non-binary artist-composers each. Those roughly 40 artists were given all four banks of sounds and allowed free reign for up to six minutes. I used small parts of the content provided and my voice as material for gestural manipulation. This piece describes the trauma of growing up “girl”. This journey from childhood to adulthood is the paradox of expectations (Määttä and Uusiautti 2020). The first set is perfection, demureness, learning wifely skills as a priority, growing up faster than boy children, that he hurts you because he likes you, and that your physical appearance is paramount. The second is the contradiction of the being better trope – that girl children’s words cannot be trusted, and that their emotions are too fragile, so everything is an overreaction. This plays a more sinister role the older the female individual becomes. It is not a universal narrative, even among cis-gendered women. However, I doubt any adult woman’s life has not been touched somewhat by internalised misogyny, advertising, or gender-based discrimination or harassment in work, school, or social settings. I used GLVD (version four) to create several layers from the donated samples and manipulate a line of spoken text (additional to the supplied material). The text and samples are curated around Fair_Play’s mission to give women, non-binary, and gender-diverse artists a platform to balance the male-dominated composition field. I used gestural manipulation to control delay and granular synthesis on the spoken text's main line, grabbing snatches of the text as it was delivered and manipulating it in real time. The low-frequency, underwater whoomph's central layer was created through live triggering and destructively editing small fragments of three artists using Genki’s Wave. I repeated this destructive process several times to create layers. I used the clarinet playing of one artist, filtered out the low frequencies, and used this to mirror the bird and nature sounds that faded over the last half of the piece. This incorporates some of my interest in animism and urban shamanism with one of the collaborators, Sage Pbbbt’s, intimate involvement and practice with urban shamanism and chaos magick by mirroring the natural through various human-made constructions and confines (Harlow 2019).