Atlantic
by emma + pj
"The use of sound is masterful and subtle. It takes all the bumps and growls of VAULT Festival and turns them into an animal to be tamed, a constant underscore of longing."
Withinherwords on Atlantic at Vault Festival, Feb 2020
Atlantic is a clown romance about division and drift. Created across Portsmouth and San Francisco, it’s a vintage aquarium fantasia about the tensions between humans and nations. Two people crash into each other, again and again. They push and they pull. The ground echoes with the shifting of tectonic plates.
The show played at Vault Festival 2020 in the Cavern, a long damp tunnel in traverse filled with the sounds of dripping water and the deep invasive rumbles from trains overhead. My design took advantage of these pre-existing sounds to recreate an ocean using a palette of imaginations created in R&D with transatlantic clown duo emma + pj.
In addition to composing original soundscapes inspired by the sea, subbass and the Vaults acoustics, emma and PJs voices were fed into various live processing systems which served to highlight, expand and undermine their attempts to communicate with each other.
The set was made up of three microphone cables hanging the length of the space, and a small portable speaker on each end. Emma and PJ would clip and unclip their microphones to each, changing both the way their voices sounded and the framing of the space.
Featured Extracts
MicSwing
The central cable was pulled down, and the two performers took it in turns to swing the microphone and move it around their bodies. In this extract, you hear the ocean palette used to structure the rest of the design.
Ground Rumble
The microphone input was routed into the Aquatic Patch™️, a module designed to replicate the deep sea. It pitchshifts the input by amplitude, giving the sense of rumbly oceanic bubbles as the mic was dragged on the floor.
The Collapse
After frustrating each other with not being able to communicate, the two performers' voices trigger a series of live input and feedback loops - their voices are captured and distorted, the palette of sounds around them gets fed into the aquatic patch and other distortion modules, eventually leading to the collapse of their world.
The whole section lasts over ten minutes; the extracts below represent how it grows. Note that these were mixed for a space with eight speakers and two subs and uses very low sounds frequently, so they might not come out very strongly through laptop speakers.
Created by emma + pj
Lighting Design by Sherry Coenen
Sound Design by Xavier Velastín
Movement Consultancy by Tilda O'Grady
18-20th Feb
Vault Festival 2020