Rebecca Bruton
Banff (Alberta)
Rebecca Bruton (MFA) is a Western Canadian composer, song-maker and vocalist. Loosely characterizing her work as understated, Surrealist folk music, Rebecca often involves sonic ideas that aestheticize tuning discrepancies, auditory illusions and other acoustic phenomena alongside of simple and surprising melodic structures. Her compositions have been performed by Quatuor Bozzini (Montréal, CA), Continuum Ensemble (Toronto, CA)and by her own ensembles. As one half of the vocal performance duo Moss Moss Not Moss (with Canadian-Icelandic poet angela rawlings), Rebecca has also presented original work at Tectonics Festival Glasgow. With Australian sound artist Alexandra Spence, she co-founded Tidal ~ Signal, a Vancouver-based festival dedicated to women and trans-identifying artists working in experimental music. Rebecca lives in Banff, Alberta.
PROJET
Mammalian Mother Tongues
For saxophone quartet
My starting point is the book called “R.A.W. Assmilk Soap”, an autobiographical self-research by a woman who ceremonially married a donkey or married the donkey’s silence. I came up with all these multiphonic sets and then I found a way of alternating between silence and multiphonic, and also alternating between melodic improvisation and multiphonic and silence, using a randomized system. I work a lot with auditory phenomena such as close-interval beating and multiphonic harmonies and I try to create musical events that have both of these things presented in very clear ways.
« How do i work with text but create non representative art forms? »
Meeting Rebecca Bruton
Mammalian Mother Tongues - Rebecca Bruton
MAMMALIAN MOTHER TONGUES
i. Where is the black milk now?
ii. Animals, plants, fungi, and microbes.
‘…she was so lovely, serene and glowing in the dim light of the loamy cowshed. She watched me with wary curiosity as I came in and knelt down beside her in the shadowy barn. Shyly, wisely, she lifted her delicate whiskered muzzle to my face and sniffed my eyes. Then she nuzzled my palms, as if to assess whether she should fear them or hope to find something good there.
…a pregnant mammal should never leave her local environment just before giving birth, because her thick first milk – known as colostrum – contains antibodies to the specific pathogens where she has been gestating. By extension, then, any milk is entangled with places: made of everything the mammalian motherbody eats, drinks, and breathes as she feeds the growing fetus and eventually the newborn.
All across the wickedly hot, haunted, weedy, and bastard-beautiful South that summer, Aliass’ blood and mammary glands brewed antibodies to hidden, harmful elements of the places we passed through....This colostrum she made held residues and traces of all the miles we travelled, wading through roadside weeds and trash and broken glass, lonesome thistle-grown hayfields, crossroads and train-tracks, and the harrowed traces of long-gone mules and ghosts of the American South…Aliass’ milk-to-be held traces of all the border-crossings, borrowed pastures, hot asphalt, roadside grasses, wakeful nights in strangers’ woods, and infinite encounters with countless other beings, both familiar and unseen – held it all like memory is supposed to’.
Mammalian Mother Tongues is a long, meandering, and very milky, song.
From R.A.W. ASSMILK SOAP (parapoetics for a posthuman barnyard), by Karin Bolender (2016 Lab for Aesthetics and Ecology & Broken Dimanche Press).
For more information on Karin Bolender and her work with the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.AW.), please visit https://ruralalchemy.com/.