Calling to Mind
Helen Thorington

 
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"..the electronic media are to us what nature…was to earlier times--the inescapable background against which we live our lives and from which we derive our references and meanings." (Steven Shaviro)

In 1993, I composed a short (and simple piece) entitled "In the Dark." It was made from a small sample of vocalist and percussionist David Moss's voice, which I played on a Yamaha synthesizer to create the background, and the cry of a single animal. Against the background of the human voice, the cry evoked a sense of terrible loneliness and loss. Nature on its last legs, as it were.

Calling to Mind, commissioned by Deep Wireless 2005, an annual radio festival in Toronto, Canada, is comprised of "space-time communication" in which the human voice can only just be heard and that only briefly at that. No longer the stuff of which the compositional background is made, it is simply a very small part of an environment of electronic media sounds--and that's the piece.

The sounds used in Calling To Mind are drawn from 25 years of recording. They come from Alaska, upstate New York, Sweden, radio, the Internet -- the many places I have been in my years of involvement with sound -- places inadvertently called to mind as I composed.
 
CREDITS
 
Sound by Helen Thorington
Commissioned by Deep Wireless, 2005
 
BIOGRAPHY
 

Helen Thorington began her career as a writer with short stories and other fictional forms that were published in small press magazines and journals throughout the 70s. In 1977 she made a transition to sound. Self-taught, her early sound/ music works include compositions for post-modern dancers Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, among them Monkey Run Road, Blauvelt Mountain, and Valley Cottage. Two of these works were revived for the year-long Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company 20th Anniversary; Helen performed her scores live at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, Massachusetts, 2002 and at The Kitchen, New York City, 2003.

Helen's productions for National Public Radio were among the first radio art works broadcast nationally. From 1977 to 1998 Helen continued to produce for radio. Her programs were aired nationally and internationally in over fifteen countries. Commissions included works for RAI (Italian radio), RNE (Spanish Radio) and ORF (Austrian radio).

Helen also composed sound scores for film. Her first film score was for Optic Nerve by Barbara Hammer which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival and the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition (1987). She received a New York State Council on the Arts Music Commission to create a second sound score for Hammer's Endangered, presented at the Whitney Museum's 1989 Biennial.

Additionally Helen created sound/music for installation, including Endangered by Jerri Allyn at the Anchorage, Brooklyn, NY (1990); Loco-motive at the 2nd International Festival of Radio Art in Wroclaw, Poland (October 1991); and an installation performance, Partial Perceptions, premiered at DiverseWorks in Houston, Texas, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris in 1992.

Helen returned to writing in 1994 to produce North Country for radio, CD-ROM and the World Wide Web. North Country was published in the Winter, 1997 issue of Black Ice.

Helen initiated the online performance event Adrift and contributed multiple text narratives and sound scores from 1997-2001. Adrift was presented at Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, the tenth anniversary celebration of Kunstradio, Vienna, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City. Adrift was supported by a Creative Capital grant.

Helen is a 1995 and 1997 recipient of a Meet the Composer grant, and a 1995 and 1998 recipient of Music Commissions from the New York State Council on the Arts. She is also a 2001 recipient of an Emerging Forms for Digital Art Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Deep Wireless Radio Art Festival, Toronto, Canada, commissioned Calling to Mind which premiered there in May 2005. Two recent prizes include Winner, Aether Festival, KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2003; and a 2003 Honourable Recognition, Prix Bohemia Radio Festival, Czechoslovakia.

Helen's web site is at http://new-radio.org/helen
 
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