Laetitia Sonami
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But with electronic music, which can be programmed and sampled, the hands can become nearly irrelevant. A musician friend of mine composes entire scores solely by typing commands into a computer (you don’t need hands to type–a pencil in the mouth will do). To “perform” the piece he presses a button, which he could do just as well with his nose. Perhaps electronic music often feels passionless because even the most sophisticated circuitry is no match for five fingers.
Laetitia Sonami, the French-born, San Francisco-based performance musician, pulls electronic music back from the brink of technological sterility and literally reshapes it with her highly expressive hands. Sonami appeared as part of Randolph Street Gallery and Experimental Sound Studio’s “Sounds Good to Me” series (which concludes this weekend with Chicago installation musician Bill Close). Sonami’s instrument is an elbow-length Lycra glove of her own design with several dozen sensors embedded in it: transducers, ultrasound detectors, an accelerometer, even a mercury switch. Each responds to movement, pressure, or both with electronic signals that travel through wires running along her arm–exposed like colorful raw nerves–to a black box strapped on her back, through a long cable, and finally to several synthesizers programmed to produce a vast array of sonic events.
“…And She Keeps Coming Back for More,” her most recent piece, relies on a purely musical narrative, beginning with evanescent, high-pitched ripples and then plunging into long, sonorous waves that create a feeling of great expanse. At the center of that expanse stands Sonami, encumbered with wires, tethered to her computer equipment, focusing entirely on her hair-trigger body-instrument. Her rigid, self-imposed confinement–she can’t travel more than a few feet, she can’t make a sudden movement without setting off an avalanche of sound–adds a poignancy that would be entirely missed in a recording. For even as she stands nearly rooted to the spot she discovers great emotional freedom, her arms widening gracefully as if to embrace her music, then cascading down to scoop up the next phrase. She looks as though she were on the verge of taking flight.
