tube station
(2025)
concert, lecture performance, 40"
wax, paper tubes, cello, microphones, tape recorder, looper
Photos © Kristina Sokolova
While calendars and schedules that surround us are arbitrary ways of organising time the cycles of years, seasons and days occur because the earth revolves around the sun – and that takes the time it takes.
Humans as well as all other living creatures on the planet mirror this rhythm in their own biological rhythm. In our body lies a negative feedback cellular mechanism that uses the time of the day, detected through the eyes, to organise the body’s functions accordingly.
In this performance I produce and play with sound in various ways. I use: a loop pedal to produce a cyclical pattern that consists of two phases, a cassette recorder to record and replay a text linearly, a beat from a laptop that exactly sonifies data from the nearby tube station, two microphones made to feedback with the speakers, placed in tubes of differing length, a chain of effects that amplifies the feedback of the cello pickup in response to its amplification through the speakers.
Tube station is a piece that overlayers daily rhythms produced by different sources.
This composition belongs to a series of works from a body of work which deals with translation of scientific publications of chronobiology studies into sound installations and compositions. In this piece I play with the contrast between the sun’s rhythm, the tube station rhythm and the non twentyfour hours sleep wake disorder of a patient reported in a publication from 1971. By appropriating pop clichés I weave words of play around daily activities and tunes into short songs.
Credits: Part of Adventurous Music Plateaux (AMP), co-funded by the European Union, within Sonic Territories Festival 2025