Visiting Lecture Series #2 Lisa Busby

Lisa Busby gave a talk during our visiting lecture series, here is a quote from her website.
“Lisa Busby is a Scottish composer, vocalist, and improviser based in London. Situated across experimental music, performance art, and pop song, her practice often utilises the found and the prosaic, and manifests in various entangled modes – long-duration and site specific work, video, non-standard scoring/notation, “anti-production” techniques for electronic music, and live improvisation for sound/body. Currently, Lisa is one of Sound and Music’s New Voices 2019 Sound and Music’s New Voices 2019 and participating in the Social Acoustics Research Project led by Professors Jill Halstead and Brandon Labelle. Materially she is interested in fragments, fringes and collisions of song and noise; artefacts of pop and fan culture, histories and archives; experimental turntablism and expanded usage of playback, samples and loops; and everyday action as/in performative gesture. Instrumentally her specialisms are in voice, turntables, hardware and software electronics, with more recent work incorporating electric guitar and lapsteel. She performs and composes with bands The Nomadic Female DJ Troupe and Rutger Hauser; is part of The Lumen Lake music collective and record label; and is a member of the art, education, and politics group Common Study based at Somerset House Studios. She has ongoing sound and movement collaborations with Gabriel Bohm Calles and Lou Barnell.”
(From lisabusby.com)

https://vimeo.com/149414193

Hollow Blown Egg

Busby’s relationship with music started singing in school choirs & church choirs. She tends to start solo music with process starts with a single repetitive motif, not very expansive (small riff). Stuck within a small loop of a sound recording. Built up layers of improvisation, usually first take to capture that rawness. “Not always doing very much” – Simplistic approach and allowing the instrument/atmosphere to go where it goes. Composition has multiple phases – for her process she relies on analogue equipment as she feels “DAWs can tend to sound less finished the more time you spent on them” – Which resonates a lot with me. Simplistic approach and less compositional thought, live and unprepared – which makes the product was more enjoyable and interesting. Explorative process driven from a philosphy of primitcism in production and embracing the absence of what’s deemed ‘proper’ recording technique. Sometimes audio etc can represent something that can’t be spoken. Catharsis through sadness and anxiety.

Collaborating with Cellist/

https://www.gold.ac.uk/visual-cultures/c-grant/

http://lisabusby.com/works/untitledforcello.html

Collaboration w/ John Harries ‘Proposal for a Song’
Series of songs of interactions, instructions to particapate. like a notebook of ideas.

https://soundcloud.com/radioqueens/lisa-busby-proposal-for-a-song

This ‘Proposal for a song’ was a direct reference to Kim Gordon’s piece ‘Proposal For a Story’