Decoys, a collaboration with Mark Peter Wright, began as a performance at a Wellcome Trust event created by Amy Cutler called Liar Lyre (2017) which we took as a chance to disrupt the Foley techniques we saw as instrumental (yet occluded) in the creation of Nature Sound.
Wanting to continue this disruption, Mark and I researched Foley techniques for sound film (and their precursors for theatre) and learned versions of these that we could perform using consumer waste (primarily plastics) and devices and objects that were part of a changing world (a cooling fan, effervescent health pills, protective gloves, fake soil). Commissioned by the multi.modal record label, we created a score for us to perform that traced a post-human entities travels across a scorched earth which was then interpreted (without hearing our version or knowing our themes) by pianist Claudia Molitor, trombonist Tullis Rennie and violinist Alison Blunt.
Mark and I wrote about Decoys in the open access anthropology journal Cardernos de Arte e Antropologia for its special Sonic Anthropocene issue. You can listen to an excerpt from Side A of the vinyl LP here.
