Experiments in recorded sound

An evening of inspiring audio, with ten quick-fire responses from artists and specialists to the incredible sound materials in the British Library collection and beyond. The second volume of Selector Responder places emphasis on issues of representation in the sound archive: what sounds get conserved and why? What are the politics of selection and response to the sonic? 

Curated by Ella Finer with contributors Shiva Feshareki, Sarah Sayeed, Johanna Linsley, Jacqueline Springer, Nadia Valman and Vanessa Brown aka Future Self.(pictured). 

Contributors

Longplayer Archive
Vanessa Brown has a long history in music, beginning with an extensive career as pop artist V V Brown. With half a million records sales and over 10 million streams V V Brown has now set up her new project, Future Self. Future Self began with collaborating on the direction of ground-breaking music video Sacrifice. Through the use of prosthetic makeup the artist in the video became a white woman exploring the concept of dual consciousness and racism. Gaining attention from British news channels and media, the video has since been exhibited internationally. The Future Self Project is an immersive, multi disciplinary practice which explores controversial subjects in and around the social sciences. 

Daphne Oram Archive
Shiva Feshareki is an internationally acclaimed experimental composer, NTS radio DJ and turntablist. Her diverse output explores acoustics, perspective and the sound of electricity through wide ranging practises that incorporate classical methodology, and her solo turntable performances fuse together sonic palettes using hyperphysical sampling techniques. In 2017, she was honoured with the British Composer Award for Innovation from BASCA.  

Stolen Voices Archive
Johanna Linsley is an artist, writer and researcher with an interest in experimental documentary, sonic fiction and queer domesticities. Her ongoing project, Stolen Voices, (with Rebecca Collins) uses eavesdropping as a methodology for performance. Johanna works at the University of Roehampton. Stolen Voices has been listening in on the East Coast of the UK for the past four years, cultivating a form of attention we refer to as 'audio salvage'. For Selector Responder, she presents a selection from our growing archive of salvaged materials.

British Library Sound Archive
Jacqueline Springer is a broadcast music journalist, university lecturer and event curator. She is an Adjunct Professor at Syracuse and Fordham universities in London, teaching undergraduate music, media and cultural studies courses. She is also a freelance contributor to BBC arts programming and an event curator, working under Contemporary Black Music and Union Black in exploring music’s cultural and sartorial origins.

Jewish Museum Archive
Nadia Valman is Reader in English Literature in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London. A scholar of 19th and 20th century urban culture with special interests in religion, gender and migrancy, she has published The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (2007) and edited The ‘Jew’ in Edwardian Culture: from the East End to East Africa (2009), Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (2013) and British Jewish Women Writers (2014). Her most recent research is on the cultural history of the East End. She has also collaborated with musicians, artists and archivists in public engagement activities in east London. In 2018 she was awarded the Hawking Award for Developed Understanding of Public Engagement for her collaboration with the Migration Museum Project on ‘Migrant Literature Walks’ in 2017 and 2018.

Image: Vanessa Brown

Season of Sound supported by

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