2000 year old Roman figurine to be reinterpreted by artists and musicians
Roman figurine to be reinterpreted by 10 musicians and artists as part of a global open-call by group of Kent museums.
The “Ten Songs for a Lar” will see 10 artists from across the globe each create a new 'audio artefact' inspired by a bronze ‘Lar’ statue – a household god figurine (dated circa. AD 200) found in Frindsbury, Kent in 1888.
After receiving hundreds of responses from across the globe the Kent-Medway Museum Partnership National Portfolio Organisation (KMM NPO) is delighted to announce the artists selected to create an audio response to an almost 2000 year old Roman Lar figurine, held in the collections at The Guildhall Museum, Rochester, UK.
The artists will ‘give voice’ to this mysterious household deity through newly commissioned sound works. Through modern composition, musique concrète, spoken word, field recording, pop and folk, artists will explore themes of identity, loss, family, home, protection, silence, time travel and animism.
The 10 selected artists are:
Anil Sebastian - a Folkestone-based artist, creative director and producer. Anil is a solo artist, member of Icelandic band Hrím, and the Founder and Director of London Contemporary Voices choir. Anil has performed with Alt-J, Manu Delago, Imogen Heap, Nitin Sawhney, Laura Mvula, Sam Smith and U2, and has toured globally.
For this commission an innovative new work entitled ‘Resonance’ will be created in collaboration with Japanese/Egyptian coder and modular synthesist Cherif Hashizume, translating physical matter into audio waves by exploring the resonant properties of the Lar figurine.
Ariel Chan – Ariel Chan (Linyuying Chen) from Yunnan Province, China, is a freelance scholar, singer, and choral director. She is dedicated to the mining and research of minority ethnic music (mainly Miao and Hani) in Southwest China.
Chan’s work will document the “cirane” and “whispering love song” recited in a nearby remote village. These songs express a continuation of a strong and existing belief if animism (the attribution of energy/living souls to inanimate objects) and provides a living, direct connection with our Lar figurine and ancient Roman beliefs. https://www.facebook.com/sijizhichun
James Marren (Cyanotape) is a UK based artist and musician exploring a wide variety of media, including photographic processes, film, installation, sound and performance. Having studied psychology and subsequently fine art at Chelsea College of Arts, he draws on a range of tools to explore the subconscious and less understood. This is just as equally a personal journey as it is a way to connect. Fragmented discoveries that often feel intimate, only to later reveal a more universal relevance.
Cyanotape will create a contemplative piece that seeks to enable listeners to connect with this artefact and the people who historically took comfort from it. https://www.cyanotape.com/
Freddie Murphy & Chiara Lee – Italian sound artists Freddie Murphy and Chiara Lee have been composing music together since 2003. Their natural inclination to write music for films, installations and readings derives from their peculiar approach to composition. The starting points of the process are visual imagery and concepts, followed by translation of their hidden meanings into music. With the moniker Father Murphy, they released concept albums focusing on expressing the sound of Catholic sense of guilt. They have performed extensively across Europe, UK, North America, Australia and Russia. Films with their original soundtrack were selected by Locarno Film Festival, MoMA Fortnight Doc Festival, etc.
For this commission they will create a song to induce a physical will to listen, alternating a quiet composition and moments of silence, as in a "game of seduction" where the audience is drawn to listen but is also asked to be longing for the next sound. “By choosing to engage in attentively listening to the Lar sound we can enable audience's curiosity towards the figurine story and what it potentially symbolises.”
Iain Chambers – Iain Chambers is a London-based composer and producer whose work explores specific locations and their changing sounds across time, as in The House of Sound (2017), and City of Women (2018). In 2019 Iain launched the independent record label Persistence of Sound, creating a new space for musique concrète, field recordings, and the uncategorizable sounds in between. In 2015 Iain staged the first ever concerts in Tower Bridge's Bascule Chambers, turning Tower Bridge into a huge resonant chamber. Iain continues to curate the annual Bascule Chamber Concerts, working with partners Thames Festival and Tower Bridge. In 2003 Iain co-founded Langham Research Centre, an electronic music ensemble using Cold War era technology to compose new music. The group also create new realisations of work by composers including John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Christian Wolff, using an unusual analogue instrumentarium.
Chambers will create a new piece of work, Household Gods, which imagines the Lar as a sounding board or receiver, picking up and amplifying the sounds of domestic objects, which are then arranged into a through-composed musique concrete work.
Lunatraktors – Margate-based ‘broken folk’ duo Lunatraktors make research-based performances rooted in body and voice: dance and gesture, body percussion, speech, vocal harmony and overtone singing. The result is an experimental fusion of live art and folk music, moving between theatres, museums, galleries, music venues and festivals. Drawing on British folk heritage and influences from contemporary art, theatre and music, Lunatraktors combine the talents of percussionist, dancer and choreographer Carli Jefferson with research artist, composer and folk singer Clair Le Couteur. Lunatraktors’ debut album This Is Broken Folk was listed in MOJO Magazine’s Top 10 Folk Albums of 2019.
“Lunatraktors will make a new ritualistic folk song and dance: an invocation to the Guildhall Lar. Whether as visitors looking through a glass vitrine, artists responding to digital images during lockdown, or partially sighted or less mobile visitors experiencing primarily through tactile sound, we want the Lar to be something that we can all touch, and that can touch us.”
Donna McKevitt & Jan Noble – Donna McKevitt writes music for film, contemporary dance and concert performance. She has collaborated with Nick Cave, Tricky and Michael Nyman. Her first work, Translucence, a song cycle of Derek Jarman’s poetry, began when scoring music for his final film Blue. Released on Warner Classics it received five-star reviews in many of the national and international newspapers and publications. Her work has been performed at The Tate, The Royal Opera House and Sadler’s Wells as well as national and international festivals and venues.
Jan Noble is a writer and a poet. He studied Fine Art at Canterbury School of Art (now UCA). His work has been broadcast on Channel 4 and BBC Radio. He has recorded at Abbey Road Studios and read at venues and festivals across Europe including the ICA, London, the Teatro Filodrammatici, Milan and Poetry on the Lake, Italy with former Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
McKevitt and Noble’s work will take the Ovid quote, “Every doorway has two sides” as a starting point for the lyrical content which will envisage the Lar as an object handed down through generations: touched held, lost, rediscovered!
Quiet Boy – Gaz Tomlinson, also known by his artist name ‘Quiet Boy’, is an alternative electronic theatre and film composer, singer songwriter and performer who resides in Margate. With over a decade’s experience of playing in bands Tomlinson has toured the UK extensively, appeared at most major UK music festivals and has had his music played by all major radio stations.
Originally trained as a theatre maker at East 15 Acting School he found composing for theatre to be a natural progression for his skill set. His debut piece was composing, musically directing and performing in critically acclaimed gig theatre ‘My Beautiful Black Dog’ by Brigitte Aphrodite and Directed by Laura Keefe. Most recently Tomlinson composed and co-wrote eco punk musical ‘Parakeet’ and has composed music for BAFTA winning script short film ‘Liverpool Ferry’ which is scheduled for release in Autumn 2020.
Tomlinson’s work for this commission will be a binaural composition featuring the voices and ruminations of ‘the real people of Kent’ – an audible thread of everydayness between current Kentish communities and those from almost 2000 years ago. The narrative will take you on a journey of hibernation, loneliness, grief, things coming to an end, the struggle of keeping a house warm and homelessness.
Stergin – Stergin is an Austrian multi-instrumentalist, composer/producer & songwriter based in London. 2018 he was awarded the highly competitive “Do It Differently Award” by Help Musicians UK. His projects have received support by the Arts Council England & The Austrian Cultural Forum London. As a performing artist his most recent cross-arts project is called “12 Photos 12 Tracks” – the global journey of a Polaroid turned into music, developed with his band “Ode To Lucius”.
For this commission Stergin has collaborated with poet Louise Fazackerley, winner of BBC Radio 3 ‘New Voice’ award, European slam finalist and support artist for Dr. John Cooper Clarke. Their piece ‘Unwritten' is focusing on a Lar silently observing everything that happened within a home. “If only this Lar could talk. What stories would it tell? Unwritten tells the story of a Roman woman and the thoughts she had while preparing dinner for the family. www.stergin.com
Yeji Yeon - Yeji Yeon is a multi-disciplinary artist of music, dance, visual and performing arts. Trained in classical singing, ballet and theatre acting- she is a performer as well as a producer to her creations including musical compositions, theatre, dance films and narrative cinema. Yeon’s music is a lullaby for lovers and dreamers, as singing is her prayer and meditation. Born in South Korea, she moved to England at a young age and is currently based in Seoul, South Korea. Much of her inspiration comes from nature, love and spirituality; she writes, sings, and records her songs often on the road in her travels around the world.
Yeon has composed a haunting and hypnotic traditional based folk song in Latin entitled Veni Lares Veni” – “I have chosen…to sing lyrics of praise; I envisioned the melody to be chant-like and simple- as how the people of the ancient times would have sang their love and praise for the Lares. I decided to accompany the singing with an Autoharp; to sound familiar to a Roman lyre. I wish to evoke the feelings, the atmosphere, and the Spirits of those times through my song.” https://www.yejiyeon.com/
Starting from September 2020, one audio response will be released every month through a rolling programme of music, discussions, lectures, and blogs.