Arachnesound

Description

CD with 16 page booklet text by Angela Dimitrakaki. Antye Greie Ripatti is an audio sculptress performing as AGF; a poetess and new media artist utilising language, sound, politics & exploring speech within the audible depths of anti-rhythmic post-internet assemblages. In this new work, Arachnesound, AGF, together with her collaborators, sought to work with an enduring language, Greek, and treat it as a tentative record of women's speech but also silence.

Effectively, AGF relied on the ambiguity of non-belonging to stitch together a counter-archive of words written, spoken, or - when she herself makes them up - associated with women's struggle for language. Greek has been a language steeped in patriarchal social relations, nation- building, and wildly generalised, civilisational 'origins'. The task that AGF set for herself was to compose a music narrative that takes women's efforts to speak beyond the canonical myths surrounding Greek language as a record. It was a difficult task, requiring much research, much listening, much translation, much acoustic imagining.

The outcome, however, is movingly rewarding - and it is so as an encounter of myth and history with the contemporary feminist avant-garde in electronic-music experimentation. Arachnesound draws on a loosely defined corpus of women's spoken word, poems, or sometimes prose, or sometimes sounds that, even if delivered in English as the contemporary global communication tool (AGF's mother tongue is German), their referent lies in Greek myth and/or history. AGF titled her new work Arachnesound to flag up the networked labour - a web of inductions and possibilities - that underpins it.