Alyona - David Mapp, Lee Richardson, Rob Godman
[Alyona] is a beautiful little girl spattered with snow. David Mapp, Lee Richardson and Rob Godman created a live performance of Poetry, Hip-Hop and Immersive sound. [Alyona] is a 1-hour continuous set. They aimed to engage audiences through performance and documentation by offering unique and unrepeatable live events where the use of technology is transparent and visual. Audience perception of ‘liveness’ is a central part of the performance.
The text for the performance was written and performed by David Mapp as part of a wider and ongoing project called Edwin, the ambition of which is to use various literary and musical forms to plunder, reveal and cleanse the psyche. The result is an intimate, revealing and visceral performance.
Edwin is an anthropomorphic fox dripping with blood.
It is almost a cliché of cultural studies that a division exists between ‘popular’ music and ‘art’ music. […] this distinction is being
eroded in digital culture.
Andrew Hugill - The Digital Musician, Routledge 2008
The anima and animus in Carl Jung's school of analytical psychology, are the two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. They are described by Jung as elements of his theory of the collective unconscious, a domain of the unconscious that transcends the personal psyche. In the unconscious of the male, it finds expression as a feminine inner personality: anima; equivalently, in the unconscious of the female, it is expressed as a masculine inner personality: animus.
David says:
The central concept of the piece, for me, was to present the sustained immersive sound as the anima of hip-hop. The composition of the script then, was a matter of exaggerating those aspects of rap which the (unbalanced!) narrator perceives as masculine, and counterbalancing them (to use Jung's language) with a prose-style suitable for reciting over the immersive sound. The exact same themes are explored in both sections, but whilst they revolve around hatred and vengeance in the rap, they revolve around love and reconciliation in the prose-poetry.
Lee says:
It was never our intention to particularly be experimental either, it was just "our" thing but when you stand back and look at it, the conventions of HipHop, and a lot of music in general; those rules have been broken; ie: not your normal rapper, not your normal arrangements, weird samples of things like BBC sample library gunshots made into drum beats, tracks interlinked by prose to tell a whole dialogue/story the collaboration of contemporary underground electronic influences with sonic art and poetry.
Ultimately we wanted to create the stuff we made so that it was playable live. Once we started on rehearsals we soon realised, apart from David's memory and breathing problems, it was fairly easy to do. I use Ableton for triggering backing parts during the show. I can do the aspects that sound good live, like drums, vox and a bit of sample dropping etc.
