Bony Labyrinth
Bony Labyrinth is a collaborative project with Ryley O’Byrne concerning the relationship between sound and vessel, and explores the capabilities of ceramic space to hold, amplify, and create music or stories. For the first installment of Bony Labyrinth, the resonant frequencies and feedback of O’Byrnes ceramics were used to compose Mackenzie’s Echea I. Echea II was composed combining ceramic tones, electronics, modular synth and field recording. On August 17th, 2019, Bony Labyrinth was exhibited as part of Graham Landin’s Mushroom Honey event, and was shown by appointment until September 15.
Vessels waiting to be filled — soil, water, plants, endless material objects. If we leave them empty, try to resist our desire or need to fill, what do they say — with a space and therefore voice of their own?
Susurrous utterings slip into a hum and grow louder, oscillating in and out of pleasure, edging on discomfort. Their resonant frequency — that is the excitation of molecules (bodies? ideas?) provoking further, greater movements, tones — singing. Feedback loops, sometimes squeals.
Is it the beginning of a conversation? A composition?
Echo is cursed to repeat only that which she last heard — the myth of a body made to dematerialize, depersonalize through an inability to speak for oneself. Without her words she undoes, turns from nymph to voice and stone. The implicated hierarchy — holy phrase to lowly sound, but Echo's gift is sonorant resonance through space/body/mind, the power of sound diffused and re-materialized, and a subversion of identity’s claim to singularity and objective through doublings’ distortions and reassembly.
We manipulate, pushing and pulling bodies, tones, levels. Is it a manifestation of our intuitive aversion to discomfort? A sign of time and place? Keep voices moderate. Modest. The gesture does not reach the intention, but the effort is honest — a wave, first, second, third, fourth, fifth.
