Thembi Soddell – Erasure from ROOM40 on Vimeo.
Thembi Soddell’s last release on Lawrence English’s Room40 label back in 2012 saw her team up with cellist Anthea Caddy for three cuts of loose, free improvisation.
Six years on, the sound artist returns to the label with Love Songs, an exercise in electroacoustic experimentation, and above you can watch the unsettling video for ‘Erasure’ which features on the release.
"The title Love Songs is a little dark humour on my behalf," Soddell explains. "As the compositional process evolved the work became a meditation on the lived experience of insidious forms of abuse within supposedly loving relationships, in connection to certain forms of mental illness. These experiences are ones of extremes and emotional intensities; the tensions between horror, beauty, rage, desire, confusion, love and perceptual annihilation.
"Also, a good deal of the source material for the album is voice. I asked Alice Hui-Sheng Chang to vocalise perceptual collapse, which I sampled and manipulated into expressions of these themes. So, these are my love songs."
Love Songs will be released alongside an extensive book which outlines more overt readings of Soddell’s ideas of contemporary relationships. You can find more information and purchase the release here.
