Fractal Meat Cuts cassette and download

For those experimental musicians whose remit is the voice, making an explicit connection between the physical apparatus of breath making and its intangible, ethereal products is often a foundational part of the job. The growls, gargles, coos and shrieks of a Phil Minton or Meredith Monk foreground their bodily origins – lungs, throat, diaphragm, mouth – while offering routes through which the human voice can roam free from its usual sociolinguistic constraints. The tension is exacerbated when electronic processing is brought into the mix,  doubling or manipulating this organic source material. Something once thought of as quintessentially human – the voice – is transformed into digitized hybridity.

The work of composer, vocalist and improviser Sharon Gal exemplifies how these opposites – organism and machine, physical and incorporeal – are held in uneasy balance. Gal’s pterodactyl screeches and rutted, throaty gasps channel the satanic chanteuse…