This track is the work of Alison Hight aka Lex dV as part of Rhizome DC's Art Doulas Project, January 2021. We asked for prompts from the general public, and we asked for artists to interpret the prompts. To read more about the project, and to see all of the entries, please visit www.rhizomedc.org/doulas

Alison's prompt was: FULL POWER TO THE VOID

Alison writes:
My first love and I would go out to the beach at night to explore what it is to be a living being and sometimes to scream into the darkness over the vast expanse of water, one of the closest things to a sense of void you can find in everyday life. That and Twitter.

The poetries of the song were created using Twitter as a starting point. These were introduced in conflicting layers and with different tonalities to echo the constant stream of voices posting into the virtual-void of the internet. Using open-source software, I pulled tweets posted from 2020 that had the word "void" in them. Then I identified the most frequently occurring words and gave them a new form and context within each poem/song. If you’re curious, some of these were: just, like, fill, people, feel, time. (surprisingly, ‘scream’ was 20th) In total there were three poems sung.

One of the thoughts I played with was the power of embracing the void, how the gravitational pull of void’s mystery and unknowability is powerful when merged with by an act of choice. And, how 'screaming into the void' is an act of self-emptying and surrender to the mystery, the power of voice as an action in the nontangible world of VOID.

Another was the energy and desire elicited by the sense of VOID: to fill the void and simultaneously be taken or consumed by the void.

And finally, the sense of chaos and lack of ground within VOID and the corresponding seeking of a mirroring voice that may or may not emerge to give some sense of ground.

The audio was created using space recordings, sonification of data sets, just generally playing around with instruments and (of course) singing. I sourced space recordings of blackholes from the NASA archives and used those to create the atmosphere (ie all that noise) and the underlying rhythms of 'breath' (one of the cool parts of this was discovering how blackhole sounds almost mimic the sound of someone breathing). These rhythms sync with the vocals, about half of which are out-of-sync with the instrumentation.

I hope you find the dark expanses within that mirror the depth and mystery of the night sky, the vastness of unlit waters, and the smallness of our place in the cosmos. And, that you have a chance to taste the power of surrendering to the mystery.

lexdv.bandcamp.com