Strange Songs
Strange Songs for voice and bird whistles
voice performance
Ute Wassermann’s voice is a hybrid, a cyborg, a chimera. Multiphonic trills and yodels, loops of ululations, sudden percussive outbursts, warbling glissandi.
Ute Wassermann´s singing transcends the human voice resulting in multidimensional sculptural sounds oscillating between electronic, animalistic, inorganic and human qualities. She takes this to the extreme by creating a visceral sound space through the use of different types of microphones.
She also masks her voice with different types of bird whistles. Some of these bird whistles preserve the voices of extinct species: although the bird no longer exists, its voice still sounds in the object. With her vocal practice, she establishes relationships between her voice and the object ‘bird whistle’, between imagined, remembered and vanished birdsong. Sonic transformations, mixtures and transmutations beyond the binary of animal and human, human and object emerge.
In strange songs, improvisational coincidences and accidents unfold a transformative power. With artistic virtuosity, Ute Wassermann interweaves controlled and uncontrollable processes in such a way that they become indistinguishable. With each performance of strange songs, the relationship between composition and improvisation is renegotiated.