Martha Skye Murphy’s opera 'Postcards Home' was a vocal dance with machines using the voice to usurp the in-built settings of analogue synths. Improvised and preserved in the state they were left, the original recordings were made on a simple 8-track device. The files were subsequently lost and corrupted but eventually retrieved by digging into the memory of the machine. What was left were process-driven snapshots, postcards to databases, hard drives, and past lives. Somewhere between an intrusive field recording and a ritualistic experiment, with the enforced site-specificity of isolation and in the absence of external life, Murphy became the field, documenting her internal movements at a time of acute stillness.
The original recordings are available to buy on cassette: [ Ссылка ]
'Postcards Home' was debuted at The Southbank Centre, commisioned by Bengi Unsal, where once lost recordings were performed within an installation of flight recorders, titled Earwitness (2022) by the composer's sister, artist, Ceidra Moon Murphy. The songs were sung to objects with traces of voices trapped inside them.
Beyond a few fragments of footage, all other audio from this performance was lost.
Filmed by Howard Sooley
