JOHN KEFALA-KERR
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 05MP3 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.