PSYCHE

Psyche is a piece for Storyteller and Soundtrack. The idea of a piece of oral story telling with a backing track of prerecorded voices was taken directly from Eliot Cole’s piece “Hanuman’s Leap”. The only problem with this piece was that it was a section of an Indian epic told by a white man from Texas, which seemed to seem a bit like cultural appropriation to me, and that it also required a percussion quartet. I have been exploring beatbox culture (I am a street performer and I beatbox there) and was interested in the extended vocal techniques associated with beatboxing, such as the drum sounds but also throat and lip bass techniques, and whether I could take Cole’s idea and remove the need for other players. I locked myself in a cupboard with a microphone and a laptop and produced the piece through a process of improvisation and refinement. I thought the piece would be 5-7 minutes long. I ended up with a 22 minute long demo of the piece which I performed at a scratch night run by the Renfrew Collective (the picture above is me in that performance) and took the audio from that for the live part. It still needs fixing.  The piece could be performed by 12 male voices and 4 beatboxers but part of it’s charm for me is that the storyteller becomes the entire mouthpiece for the story, almost like a cybernetic enhancement that allows them more expressive power in their storytelling.