I’ve struggled with silence. I think maybe we all have. I don’t know if it’s a necessary struggle, if it makes us better or worse. If there is any better or worse, if it is part of who we are or exactly the opposite. But I know that there are things that have this inherent silence. And it is saturating, and it is comforting only for the necessity of our wanting. Only because we need to be comforted. We find what comfort we can in it or we make art, and at some point I guess we try to make out difference between the two. I learned classical piano and music theory at a ridiculously young age, keeping up classical training only for the love of not having to go home, and it gave me a language that was only available to those whom were taught to read it. But my art has been about the same things long before I learned to play, and so I purposefully won’t judge the writing by the pen when I am in fact trying to scream. So when we fill that silence, it is art. To me at least. It is the second click of a kettle re-boiled, the way the hum of the fridge and the microwave dance and bicker when the temperature is just so. The subtlety of a sigh. The emotion of an interval in context. It might be what we don’t say but it is not silence. In my work I look to capture a feeling, a moment, a space in-between through musical arrangement and real time vocal processing and performance. I think we need this space the let ourselves be saturated. To be completely defined by what we are not. By those otherwise silences. Just for a moment. Because I don’t just need to scream, I need to scream without the fear that I will never be able to stop. Or never be able to say anything else. We need to know that to scream is not to risk never again having the opportunity to say nothing at all.
