voiles
Leila Bordreuil
Music: April 27, 2016
Leila Bordreuil presents Voiles, a performance piece featuring vocalist Charmaine Lee. This piece, which incorporates cello, voice, electronics and an assemblage of different amplifiers, is part of an ongoing exploration of sound distortion achieved solely through the process of amplification. Using old, deteriorating cassette tapes found outside of churches in Brooklyn, New York and Flint, Michigan, Voiles specifically focuses on decay, and the distortion that arises from the aging of electronics. Damaged recordings of sermons, funerals, and accounts of personal struggles are obscured by new layers of sounds recorded on broken or under-powered cassette recorders. Along with these veiled recordings of past lives, Bordreuil and Lee will be experimenting with various amplifiers to enhance the great variety of textures and timbres that can be produced through the amplification of their respective instruments.
Biography
Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn based cellist, composer, sound-artist, and curator. Her cello playing is often improvised, and primarily focuses on texture variations and a collage of phantom overtones and pitched utterances. Through an original vocabulary of extended techniques, preparations, and imaginative amplification methods, her instrument is used as an abstract resonant body to challenge conventional cello practice. Her compositions draw from a similar texture-based aesthetic, but also focus on the relationship between sound and space. Leila has performed at the Whitney Museum, MoMA Ps1, The Kitchen, Issue Project Room, The Stone, and many basements across the North East.