Canilla is a newly sculpted project by Norwegian sound artist and instrument builder Camilla Vatne Barratt-Due. Frequently composing for dance and theatre productions she develops sonic fields that often includes electronics and live coded synthesis merged with materials from her extensive accordion collection. Canilla’s performative installations have been presented in museums and theatres as well as sound-art, dance and music festivals in Germany, Denmark, Spain, Sweden, UK and Norway. The music is arranged and produced by Ådne Meisfjord, who is also part of the performance act.
Canilla is engaged in a technology of the mouth and a memory of the hand. She forms a garment of sonic rhymes, stories of the mule, the music from the past and other memories tied to the ocean sea. Shipwrecks are transformed into flower beds whilst love ballads are sung from wounded forests about beetles leaving their traces in the bark of trees threatened with extinction. A humming of afterlives depict time buried in cracks and other residues of life lived.
Behind the stories pumps a mechanical heart, a structure based on creations of dismantled accordions played with an altered mechanical system. Canilla approaches the instrument as an off-spring of industrial mass-production and music histories, connecting parts of disassembled accordions to DIY electronics. Long durational performative installations constitute sets of arrangements for vocals, synths, accordions, machines, electro-mechanical pneumatics and accordion reeds – they are technical sounding mentalities where listening becomes a field trip through a found environment.
Download press photo here (Credit: Kari Jahnsen)
