painting – jessica gabriel : : : artist

“dish of orcas is a flash in the pan; bite sized muscular predators of the sea that are endangered.”
-chloe ziner

excited to announce that today dish of orcas gets hatched into the whirl’d

i am one among 20 artists who have all made work specifically for the 20×20 Project: brainchild of neil stringfellow/audio obscura.

the concept is that every 20 days in 2020 (starting on jan 20th), an album of 20 twenty second songs gets released.

g’listen to the full 400 second concoction…

dish of orcas

………..

q&a

How did you find creating music for the 20×20 project?

Fun loops in restraint. I enjoy the limits set by this project. Art is free to wriggle wildly inside clearly defined frames.

Describe the approach you had for making a 20 second long track?

Initially I mulled over the numerology of it all…like something in the saying “2020 hindsight”. I thought maybe math or nostalgia could help guide me through this. I turn 40 years old in 2020 too, so that milestone might have some sort of significance here. The passing of time, the restrictions in time, the way time loops. Regurgitating time into smaller digestible bits. This collection of songs/sketches has burst forth from a place of random memory excavation: by rooting through field recordings and dream journal excerpts I collected onto cassette tape over the past year.

How did this approach differ from making music without a strict time-limitation?

As listeners, how does our attention increase when we know that there is a strict time limit set on what is being shared? What type of story can actually be told in 20 seconds? in 400 seconds? How can I make each second count? I felt these limits force me to trim my source materials more ruthlessly in an effort be more succinct.

Is there a theme, narrative or concept to the 20 tracks you’ve contributed?

I wanted the whole album to sound sort of like shuffling tarot cards, tossing them down, and then trying to make (non)sense from the symbols that are played into the ears at random. I create sound collage in a similar way that I create visual art. What colour catches your ear? What sounds do the eyes follow? It’s as if each of these twenty second tracks could represent an art card pulled at random. That card could then also fit together with the next 20 second image to answer any “question” the listener may pose to the sounds as a tool for random sound divination(?!) The result is pure dadaism, which to me is essentially tarot, the subconscious, and an open invitation into the dreamtime.
Meaning is optional.

What instruments / software did you use to create the pieces?

All sounds are originally recorded onto cassette tape: field recordings, dream journal excerpts, ukulele, jaw harp, voice, plucking elastic bands; then everything gets cut up and layered in the computer with audacity.