• Alternating Lunes is a project of collaboration between Siamak Anvari, Kevin Toksöz Fairbairn, and Leslee Smucker. Alternating Lunes sculpt soundscapes out of metal leaves, trembling diaphragms, and the myriad strands of steel wire, bowhair, and copper cables that stitch them all together. Sharing a mutual obsession with materiality and vibration, they craft prepared violins, speakers, and other fantastical hybrid instruments, inviting these materials and their resonances into an ongoing practice of collaborative composition. As these illusory voices merge and meld, Alternating Lunes explore acoustic topographies that shift seamlessly from metallic rattling to buzzing drones to mechanical ostinatos. (text KTF)

can you hear sunrays?

see trumpet calls?

taste the shape of words?

-excerpt from “Alternating Lunes”

by Bernadette Mayer and Philip Good

This project is supported by The NetherlandsAmerica Foundation

  • Leslee Smucker is a performer-composer utilising violin, voice, synthesisers, electronics, film, and poetry. For Rewire 2023’s Sensory Sensitive Concert, Smucker has developed the performance Worlds Within, a concert performance that evokes and invites discovery of sound within ourselves. Through this concert — suitable for stimulus-sensitive audiences — she invites the audience into sound worlds and resonances that reside within us by creating an environment conducive to listening, accompanied by resonances that invite deep listening and reflection. The concert takes the setting inspiration from a prehistoric cave, and  travels through six tableaus composed for solo violin using octave lower strings, mutes, low-rosined bows, and handmade ceramic resonators. The hope of the work is to celebrate what is usually unheard or unnoticed—illuminating resonances with our ancient selves.

    Bowls made by Laurent Merchant

    Commissioned by Rewire Festival

Mixed Messages (2019), violin, live electronics, answering machines

Mixed messages is an interactive sound experiment based on the tension between technology, communication, and human interaction. This semi-improvisatory, modular, sound collage has two parts. Part I runs through eight messages and builds layers by recording recorded and live sounds; streaming undercurrents from past massages as well as new techniques. As the messages progress, the recordings become more distorted; recording on top of recording, resulting in feedback, disintegration, and degradation of the message. The installation consists of cassette recordings placed throughout the audience. The audience can control which players are sounding at any given time by an on/off foot switch.

During the first part, I ask my audience to record messages on a portable tape recording during the performance. Part II is a live manipulation of the first half messages. In each half, eventually the tape loops, answering machines, violin, and voice change, degrade, dissolve, and modify.

The performance allows for audience members to consider their role in the performance; allowing for a rumination on non-verbal communication, and the degradation of message through technology.