In this eight-speaker spatial sound work, language is the element of tension always brewing beneath, yet never surfacing. For the duration of this improvised, collaborative, spatial sound performance, both vocal and instrumental, we eschew any form of spoken or written languages via human or other technological means. By spatial sound, it is meant that the sound itself does not remain centered but rather moves from point to point, dependent largely on the architecture of the room itself.

Why Un-Language?

Un-Language is the un-doing of language; its primary goal is to avoid language. It resembles and closely approximates linguistic sonorities, and may even produce bits of language unfamiliar to its performers or listeners. We speak Un-Language because the human impulse is to communicate, yet the gap between the signifier and the signified, to invoke Barthes, is at times too great to be bridged. Thus we have decided to empty that gap, and allow the audience to interpret an individual, perhaps incidental meaning via phonetic happenstance, negative text, and silence.

Here in this darkened room, semantic content is on hiatus. Un-Language is like a Rorschach test for listening.

The performance itself consists of the performers lined with our backs against the walls surrounding the audience, who sits in the middle. Each performer speaks into the microphone or else creates sound from that vantage point.