Gender of Sound — Listening Set #4:
Sarah Hennies & Leif Elggren
Gender of Sound is an artistic research and development project led by artists Susanna Jablonski and Cara Tolmie that explores past, present and future debates on the position of gender, performativity and resistance within sound. Attempting to find ways to listen together with specific emphasis on how we might perceive music through a frame of gender the project hosts an ongoing series of Listening Sets and Listening Sessions. These events endeavour to find a collective language to reflect upon what we hear, how it affects our bodies, its poetic dimension, its political and cultural implications and how this might relate both to personal and common experience.
This Listening Set will present two works by Sarah Hennies and Leif Elggren. Each set will last up to 20 minutes after which there will be time to find ways to reflect together upon what we have just heard. By searching for a diverse collective language in this reflection we want to begin to understand how we listen and what it might tell us about the preferences, histories and associations we each hold within our bodies. For this reason it is important that this process learns from a wide range of testimonies from friends, peers and a wider public — so please join us!
All experience or inexperience, passion, scepticism, excitement and taste towards music is warmly welcomed.
Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer and percussionist currently residing in Ithaca, NY. Her work is primarily concerned with an immersive, psychoacoustic presentation of sound brought about by an often grueling, endurance-based performance practice that Nathan Thomas of Fluid Radio described as "a highly sophisticated and refined performance technique...that starts and ends with listening and encourages a different way of listening from its audience."
Leif Elggren is a Swedish artist who lives and works in Stockholm.
Active since the late 1970s, Leif Elggren has become one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual. A writer, visual artist, stage performer and composer, he has many albums to his credits, solo and with the Sons of God, on labels such as Ash International, Touch, Radium and his own Firework Edition.
His music, often conceived as the soundtrack to a visual installation or experimental stage performance, usually presents carefully selected sound sources over a long stretch of time and can range from mesmerizingly quiet electronics to harsh noise. His wide-ranging and prolific body of art often involves dreams and subtle absurdities, social hierarchies turned upside-down, hidden actions and events taking on the quality of icons.
Cara Tolmie spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her works have been performed and exhibited widely at art galleries, music festivals, biennials, conferences and in the public space – both as solo presentations and collaborative projects.
Her practice at large investigates the complexity of the bind between the voice and body - of how voice can traverse internal and external realities of both the sounder and listener and how it can research various qualities of embodiment, pleasurable and disjointed. Within this she often explores performative techniques that dis/reorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of defamiliarised, uncanny and repetitive vocalisation.
Cara is currently a PhD candidate in Critical Sonic Practice at Konstfack, Stockholm. She also collaborates regularly with Rian Treanor, Stine Janvin, Susanna Marcus Jablonski, Em Silén, Moa Franzén and Julia Giertz.