JOHN KEFALA-KERR

 

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10 07

 

The venue for Guy Dartnell's voic(e)motion workshop 
became a liminal space for the first weekend of 
October.  Thanks for setting it up Paula.


08 07

 

My notebooks...containing sketches 
and drafts forThimio's House—
a 'musicological fiction'.
READ AN EXTRACT

 

 

07 07

 

During the summer I did the music for 
Maki Kobayashi's animated film, 
Strawberry Loop.  It's being shown at the 
Nagano Film Festival in Japan in 
November 07 and the London Short 
Film Festival in Jan 08.
.


02 06


READ WKD2, a musical microstory.


07 05




MP3 DOWNLOAD & read about Hidden Rivers.




 

"The eklesia of Agios Efstathios is 
a twenty-minute walk up the mountain 
behind my house.  It waits for me to 
sit on its cool stone step . . . "

I gave a presentation entitled Writing Music: 
Adventures in Creative Musicology at the
 International conference Great Writing at 
Portsmouth University in July.  The 
presentation consisted of extracts from
Uncommercial Plainsongs of the 21st Century. 
.



05 05

My blog for the BBC Radio 4 Today 
programme is offline now.  
I've archived some of it HERE



03 07

Triptych (Antwerp), an audio/video installation 
developed under the auspices of the PoPok workshop, 
Belgium, and presented at de Singel Arts Centre and 
later at the Stephenson Museum, Newcastle.  
Surround sound fashioned from environmental 
recordings made in the streets of Antwerp during the 
Klank van de Stad festival is played into the gallery space. 
The visual point of focus is the ‘triptych’ formed by 
three miniature video screens arranged in geographical 
proximity and in parodic reference to the Rubens triptych in 
Antwerp’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Triptych (Antwerp) 
presents incidental urban images as symbolically 
charged —a giant crane is a crucifix, graffiti on a wall 
captions passers by with a message of love.
MP3 DOWNLOAD
(audio only)

 

07 03





Creation: an opera in a marquee. 
  
  

02 03

Testament: A Movie Icon installed in the baptistry
at St Michael's Parish Church, Cumbria.

 

11 02

AirSpace (Waygood Gallery) 

In AirSpace I conducted a virtual flight from my 
home in north east england to my home in north east 
Greece using flight simulator software. The real-time flight 
took 15 hours in a Cessna 152.  Terrestrial sounds, trinkets 
and waste packaging from the various countries under the 
flightpath (gathered the previous year) accumulate in the space 
as the flight progresses, accompanied by composed music. 
I took some flying lessons prior to the performance so I 
wouldn't crash and could deal with the dead-reckoning 
navigation. Four fuel stops after departure I landed 
safely and didn't get lost once.
 

10 02

Telephone Audiodrama (Waygood Gallery)

 

05 02

 Passion: an opera in a sports centre. 

Paula Turner and I scoured Cumbria in search 
of a Foot and Mouth-free farm that we could 
borrow a sheep from to use in the show. 
We failed, but got a hairdresser and a magician 
instead, plus 72 other stalwarts. An section 
from Passion was later performed at the Cutting 
Edge Festival in London, where the original 
of the score went astray (no backup copy!), 
which upset me a lot and made me feel 
very stupid.  Later, it set me off on a train of 
thought about the status of such objects, which 
in turn led me to Carolyn Abbate's great article 
Music—Drastic or Gnostic

 

04 01

Miracle in Sonic Postcards: 
19 real and imaginary journeys in sound

"'John Kefala-Kerr's Miracle' is 
another gem. A young boy's voice 
brings to mind Gesang, but that 
reference quickly melts into a 
smorgasborg of church organ, 
computer keyboard and techno 
rhythm samples. I won't pretend 
that I'm not partial to Pop 
references and humour, so I 
had to single out this work! 
Miracle has a zapping quality 
to it . . .very effective."
      (Ned Bouhalassa)
MP3 DOWNLOAD

 

12 00

A glimpse from the 'wings' of the cinema that Ikon of the Nativity 
was staged in. The piece is largely populated by children 
and babies (animals on video).  It's the most "drastic" performance 
I've ever made—teetering and rickety and naive, referencing
school nativity plays and Puccini in equal measure.