Friday, May 24th, 2024
8:00pm

AUTOMATA' s Experimental Sound series TAPETAIL presents

Cecyl Ruehlen–Concentric Tethers 

Concentric Tethers is an itinerant composition by Cecyl Ruehlen. Originally featured on BBC Radio 3, as a part of a series of 10 audio-video performances recorded between January and May 2021 throughout the Sonoran Desert, this slowly morphing composition uncouples numerous objects from their conventional acoustic tones and usages. While reed instruments take a literal “central” role in the performance, they become one of many objects of vibration, each carrying the weight of their specific construction and embodied lexicon. The tethered system of bells, found wood, and detritus linked to the performer’s limbs contorts, flexing towards and away from tensions and collisions of various bodies in relation. Binding, amplifying and obstructing instruments become operations that allow Ruehlen to touch and hear, to grapple with a multiplicity of sounds in unfamiliar ways. Concentric Tethers struggles with the haunted self: Those personal entanglements and societal impasses that open up rifts of possibility for leaving behind outmoded versions of identity and relationship to place.