Gail Priest is a Sydney-based sound artist. Her practice involves
sound design/composition for performance, installation
and electro-improvisation. She is also a curator, writer and commentator on sound and new media arts.
Artist Statement:
I seek to have a multi-faceted practice in which sound is the key material of communication and investigation. The outcomes of this may take the form of solo laptop improvisation, live audiovisual collaborations, soundscores for performance and dance, gallery installations, curation of exhibitions and concert events, and critical writing on sound and related media arts.
I am interested in testing the porous barrier between abstraction and representation. Pure abstraction can result in alienation, a failure to communicate, while representational techniques are often too charged with narrative distractions and cultural cliché. My work employs a sensuality and a deliberate prettiness, intertwined with harsh, cracked and abrasive elements, to both lure and challenge a listener. In this way I strike a balance between making music and breaking music.
I am particularly interested in the facility of sound to create a simile of space and time—atmosphere. By stretching, looping and manipulating samples, augmented by instrumental and vocal improvisations, I create soundscapes that aim to capture the essences of places, dreams and memories.
My sound scores frequently utilise an aesthetic methodology that I call near-foley in which sounds are created from unrelated sources, but conjure the texture, rhythm and spatial aspects of a concrete sound. The space that opens between the sense of recognition and the realisation that the sound is not ‘true’, allows people to actively listen to the characteristics of the sound itself while still drawing on overtones of meaning and metaphor. Within both live, and installation work I also have a strong interest in multi-channel presentations, through standard and lo-fi techniques, in order to create a visceral state of immersion. This sensory saturation serves to seduce and over stimulate the viewer allowing for a redefinition of the space in which they receive the work.
Sound
Gail
has been performing live compositions since 2002 at national events
such as impermanent.audio, the now NOW festival,
disorientation, if you like improvised
music we like you, 1/4
inch, Liquid
Architecture (2003/ 2006) and electrofringe (2005/2007).
In 2007 she co-produced (with Sam James) Immersion: Electrical Empathy, an audiovisual intensive residency and installation/performance featuring Gail and Sam, Jason Sweeney, Cicada, Scott Morrison, Peter Newman and Ai Yamamoto, at Performance Space, CarriageWorks. She also curated and performed in Circadian Rhythms, with Tarab and Jim Denley at Artspace.
Commissions include:
• a radiophonic work fo ABC Radio's Orpheus Project (2007)
• a site-specific multi-channel sound
performance for Elizabeth Bay House (2006)
• a radiophonic work fo ABC Radio's Figures in the Soundscape (2006)
• co-composition of a series of works with Continuum
Sax for computer/electronics and
saxophone quartet which premiered at the Conservatorium of Music (2005)
• ABC
Radio's In Night Air Audioteque live broadcast (2005)
• a new work for Typhoon - a festival of national and international sound performance at Artspace curated by caleb.k (2 005)
• a work for headphones fo h.phone—curated by caleb.k (2003)
• a track for Melatonin,
a double CD and installation by Lawrence English presented at Next
Wave 2004 in Melbourne and MAAP04 in Singapore.
In 2001/2 she was awarded a 3 month residency with ABC Radio Performance and Features to produce Music Theatre for Radio resulting in Poems to Sing Angelic to and An Accidental Guide to Sydney 2002 which have since been aired on The Listening Room.
A debut CD of sound works, imaginary conversations in reverberant rooms, was released in Nov 2006.
Sound for Performance
Originally trained as a performer (with a BA in Performance-Theatre from the University of Western Sydney), a large part of her audio work is as a sound designer for performance.
Some recent works
include:
• Deborah Pollard's Blue Prints (2007) - Performance Space
• Version 1.0's Deeply Offensive and Uttery Untrue (2007) and Wages of Spin (2005/6) - Performance Space
• Martin del Amo's solo dance works Never Been This Far Away from Home (2007), Under
Attack (2005) which toured the UK in Feb 2006 including Arnolfini's Inbetween Time Festival, and Unsealed (2004) - Performance Space
• Constellations
(2005/2006/2007), Song of Ghosts (2004), Forked Tongues (2001) and Replicant Hotel (2000) and Altered States (2003) for Pact.
She is also currently working on works with Nalina Wait & Jane McKernan, Karen Therese and Martin del Amo.
Sound for Installation
In 2006 Gail created a multichannel modular sound track for Lake Without Water, a video installation by Alex Kershaw and Scott Anderson at Artspace, Sydney.
Previous work includes a creative development with UK sound artists Alex Bradley and Charlie Poulet on WhitePlane 2 at the Engine Room (Bridgwater UK), a surround sound installation originally commissioned for In Between Time at Arnolfini Bristol (2004).
In 2003 she was awarded a Research and Development grant by the New Media Fund to learn surround sound mastering and to develop an installation/performance work called Sonic Salon.
Earlier work includes collaborations with Caitlin Newton-Broad creating two performance/installation works: Dead Girls' Party (Performance Space, 1997) based on William Burroughs' unfortunate aim; and White Collar Project (2000) a site-specfic multimedia performance event looking at the city and its monsters, that took place on a rooftop in Sydney's CBD.
Sound for Video
Gail has composed the soundscores for video works by Samuel James including Simulated Rapture recently exhibited at the CarriageWorks, Midnight Dancer, to be exhibited during the Sydney Festival 2008, and Post-Romantic which was included in several international dance film festivals.
She also co-composed (with Vic McEwan) the soundscore for Quietly Collapsed, created by Rosie Dennis with Sam James, a dance film commision for ABC TV and Channel 4 UK.
Curation & Publication
In 2007 she co-produced (with Sam James) Immersion: Electrical Empathy, an audiovisual intensive residency and installation/performance featuring Gail and Sam, Jason Sweeney, Cicada, Scott Morrison, Peter Newman and Ai Yamamoto, at Performance Space, CarriageWorks. For Artspace she also curated Circadian Rhythms, a concert featuring Tarab, Jim Denley and Gail Priest looking at the sonic biorhythms of the city.
In 2006 Gail curated What Survives: sonic residues in breathing buildings, an exhibition of sound sculpture and installation at Performance Space, and unNnatural Selection - the first new media art exhibition for the Manning Regional Gallery in regional NSW. In 2005 she produced and curated a series of live audiovisual events called e)scapes.
Through 2003 & 2004 Gail was co-director of Electrofringe - a national new media arts festival in Newcastle NSW. In 2004 she curated the Sound component of dLux media arts' d>art festival which was exhibited at the Sydney Opera House and also co-curated a screening program, AlternaTerraZones, for Transmediale. She was co-curator with Michaela Coventry of Hold On…(2002) and Sounds Like...? (2003) a program of sound works played exclusively on the hold music of Performance Space.
She has taught at the University of Western Sydney in the Theatre Making and Performance course and is also the associate editor, graphic and web designer, and writer for the national contemporary arts magazine RealTime.
She has also edited and written chapters for Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia due to be published by UNSW Press/The Australia Council in November 2008.
photo: Samuel James