Jennifer Walshe - Nature Data

Our review
Customer reviews
Press release
Soundclips

4...according to our Brian on Thu 06 May, 2010.

I'll never quite get over the time we listened to Mike Patton's voice manipulation CD on Tzadik once. Gibbering, howliing, screaming, whispering-in-tongues, clucking, grunting & possibly vomiting on dead babies - he probably did all these things and more. I then thought he was totally taking the piss for whistling the final hurdle of the CD until someone pointed out Mike had gone home and it was this gale outside trying to finger our window frames a bit too lasciviously. Laughing stock I was. Jennifer Walshe is another voice manipulator as well as a brilliant sound-artist. Her stuff is in turns fascinating, mildly distressing & side splittingly funny. She's very talented. 30 years ago she'd probably have been bundled away by men in white coats for emitting this kind of gibbering "human song" which does rather separate her from the majority of the pack! I'm so glad she isn't in a padded room though and is free to express her inner-jungle to the outside world. The way she clicks on & off a tape recording of a documentary about noisy mating amphibians & other such biological wonderment to splice up one of the earlier pieces is wicked. This is probably the most interesting CD i'll hear this month. Jennifer has a pretty unique range & a wonderfully quirky attitude to music making - this CD is stuffed with many brief & sonically intriguing passages, it has these random overlapping spoken-word monologues mixed with stunning field recordings & found-sound. There's some unbelievable frequencies she attains throughout this CD as well, possibly manipulated in parts by technology but i'm convinced this is mostly pure voice. Unbelievably curious....

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Why is the phoneme the most ‘ideal’ of signs? Where does this complicity between sound and ideality, or rather, between voice and ideality, come from? When I speak, it belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself [je m’entende] at the same time that I speak. The signifier, animated by my breath and by the meaning-intention, is in absolute proximity to me. The living act, the life-giving act, the Lebendigkeit, which animates the body of the signifier and transforms it into a meaningful expression, the soul of language, seems not to separate itself from itself, from its own self-presence.’ [J.Derrida, the Voice That Keeps Silence, Speech and Phenomena]
Voice – Breath – Signifier; Walshe’s debut release on Interval Recordings signifies the temporary hidden space, the interval, just about to be revealed. ‘Nature Data’, the album’s title, captures Walshe’s unique voice in the field of sonic arts and performance; as a becoming-animal, becoming-nature, her voice, breaths and all occurrences in between, audible and not, signifies that data, as nature, as presence.