The double-mouth

The double-mouth + collective-mouth: audio work in the gaps of the voice

Brandon LaBelle and Ricardo Basbaum

Our vocal mechanism can be understood to contain two mouths – one being the oral cavity, including the tongue and teeth, and which the opening and the closing of the lips articulates, and the second, that of the glottis, the aperture residing farther back, in the throat and which controls the pressures and modulations of air flow. The mouth and the vocal cords, the lips and the glottis: two mouths, each with their own relation to speech, and each participating in the frictions and faculties of voicing. The double-mouth can be highlighted as the meeting of the body and language, where the glottis as the interior mouth (the bodily flesh) converses with the exterior mouth (the social voice) articulated by the lips.

Exploring this double-mouth, the project sets out to occupy and amplify the space between – that gap wherein body and language meet, where the interior rises up to vibrate the glottis, then traveling through the mouth, to extend from the lips and into enunciation. All the dynamics and intensities taking place in this gap, this space between in and out, glottis and lips, can be understood through the history of sound poetics, vocal performances, and what De Certeau calls the "opera of glossolalia".

Also, when two bodies relate to each other, language and senses play a role in the processes of getting in touch and communicate – this constitutes another double layer that involves the body and the social space, communication tools and their protocols. Through these protocols, the mouth is socially trained to perform and administrate the economy of the several contact layers that open up between this body – its senses and pulsions – and other bodies. Here, speech, writing and other communication and contact tools and mediators perform and extend the body to the outer territories and make it multiply audible. This might be a second aspect of the double-mouth: one that pushes the body to its outside; the mouth as a collective, social external site.

Researching these gaps, these histories, and these poetics, the project is developed as a double-mouth, even triple-mouth: audio collaborations between students from Bergen and students from Rio de Janeiro.

Zizek on human voice: Muholland Drive, The Dictator & Dr. Mabuse - the weird [creepy?] dimention of the voice

When I think about "the human voice" I always remember this Zizek's film, "The pervert's guide to cinema", when he analyses the diabolic apspect of the voice on some classic scenes. I found a transcription of the movie here and I copied and pasted the fragment where the talks about:



The first big filmabout this traumatic dimension of the voice, the voice which freely floats aroundand is a traumatic presence, feared, the ultimate moment or object of anxiety which distorts reality, was in ’31 , in Germany, Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr Mabuse.
 
"You and the woman will not leave this room alive.
Monster! Stop, please!"
 
We do not see Mabuse till the end of the film. He is just a voice.
 
"You will not leave this room alive."

 
And to redeem through your son, who lives and reigns with youin the unity of the Holy Spirit,God, forever and ever.  So, the problem is, which is whywe have the two priests at her side, how to get rid of this intruder, of this alien intruder. It is as if we are expecting the famous scene from Ridley Scott’s Alien to repeat itself. As if we just wait for some terrifying, alien,evil-looking, small animal to jump out.There is a fundamental imbalance, gap, between our psychic energy, called by Freud “libido”, this endless undeadenergy which persists beyond life and death, and the poor, finite, mortal reality of our bodies.
 
This is not just the pathology of being possessed by ghosts. The lesson that we should learn and that the movies try to avoid is that we ourselves are the aliens. Our ego, our psychic agency, is an alien force, distorting, controlling our body. Nobody was as fully aware of the properly traumatic dimension of the human voice, the human voice not as the sublime, ethereal medium for expressing the depth of human subjectivity, but the human voice as a foreign intruder. Nobody was more aware of this than Charlie Chaplin.
 
Chaplin himself plays in the film two persons, the good, small, Jewish barber and his evil double, Hynkel, dictator. Hitler, of course. He bit my finger. The Jewish barber, the tramp figure, is of course the figure of silent cinema. Silent figures are basically like figures in the cartoon. They don’t know death. They don’t know sexuality even. They don’t know suffering. They just go on in their oral, egotistic striving, like cats and mice in a cartoon. You cut them into pieces, they’re reconstituted. There is no finitude, no mortality here. There is evil, but a kind of naive, good evil. You’re just egotistic, you want to eat, you want to hit the other, but there is no guilt proper. What we get with sound is interiority, depth, guilt,culpability,in other words, the complex oedipal universe.Here you are.Get a Hynkel button. Get a Hynkel button. A fine sculpture with a hooey on each and every button.
 
The problem of the filmis not only the political problem, how to get rid of totalitarianism, of its terrible seductive power, but it’s also this more formal problem, how to get rid of this terrifying dimension of the voice. Or, since we can not simply get rid of it, how to domesticate it, how to transform this voice nonetheless into the means of expressing humanity, love and so on.
German police grabs the poor tramp thinking this is Hitler and he has to address a large gathering.
 
"I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be an emperor.
That’s not my business.
I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone.
I should like to help everyone, if possible.
Jew, gentile, black man, white,we all want to help one another.
Human beings are like that."

There, of course, he delivers his big speech about the need for love, understanding between people. But there is a catch, even a double catch.
 
"Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!"

People applaud exactly in the same way as they were applauding Hitler. The music that accompanies this great humanist finale, the overture to Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin,is the same music as the one we hear when Hitler is daydreaming about conquering the entire world and where he has a balloon in the shape of the globe. The music is the same.

This can be read as the ultimate redemption of music, that the same music which served evil purposescan be redeemed to serve the good. Or it can be read, and I think it should be read,in a much more ambiguous way, that with music, we can not ever be sure. In so far as it externalises our inner passion, music is potentially always a threat.

There is a short scene in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, which takes place in the theatre where we are now, where behind the microphone a woman is singing, then out of exhaustion or whatever, she drops down. Surprisingly, the singing goes on. Immediately afterwards, it is explained. It was a playback. But for that couple of seconds when we are confused, we confront this nightmarish dimension of an autonomous partial object. Like in the well-known adventureof Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, where the cat disappears, the smile remains.

You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself. And the mome raths outgrabe. The fascinating thing about partial objects, in the sense of organs without bodies, is that they embody what Freud called “death drive”. Here, we have to be very careful. Death drive is not kind of a Buddhist striving for annihilation. I want to find eternal peace. I want… No. Death drive is almost the opposite. Death drive is the dimension of what in the Stephen King-like horror fiction is called the dimension of the undead, of living dead, of something which remains alive even after it is dead. And it’s, in a way, immortal in its deadness itself. It goes on, insists. You can not destroy it. The more you cut it, the more it insists, it goes on. This dimension, of a kind of diabolical undeadness, is what partial objects are about.







And you can download this film's torrent here.

Partners

Ana Paula Ferrari Emerich / musicaemovimento@gmail.com

Georgia Rodger / georgia.rodger@khib.no

Gustavo Ribeiro Machado / gustavomachado_03@hotmail.com

Marit Tunestveit Dyre / marit.tunestveit@khib.no

Luiza Crosman / luizacrosman@gmail.com

Ruta Vaitukaityte / ruta.vaitukaityte@khib.no

Raoni Moreno / raonimoreno.hari@yahoo.com.br

kiyoshi farias / mypinkpopcorn@yahoo.com

Isabel Carneiro / bebelcarneiro@terra.com.br

Numi Thorvarsson / numi.thorvarsson@khib.no

Cecilia Cavalieri / ceciliacavalieri@gmail.com



Jonathan Herbert / jonathan.herbert@khib.no

Tatiana Klafke / klafke@gmail.com

Susi Law / unexpectedwords@gmail.com

Robson Camara / rbsncamara@gmail.com

Bjørn-Henrik Lybeck / bjorn-henrik.lybeck@khib.no

Aline Oliveira / alineoliver.cs@gmail.com

Kerstin Juhlin / kerstin.juhlin@khib.no

Priscilla Menezes / priscilla.menezes@gmail.com

Tor-Finn Malum Fitje / tor-finn.fitje@khib.no

Luisa Tavares / luisamtbr@yahoo.com.br

Karla Katja König / karla-katja.konig@khib.no

Aldene Rocha / aldene.rocha@gmail.com

Ingeborg Blom Andersskog / ingeborg.andersskog@khib.no

Leandra Lambert / leandra.lambert@gmail.com

Alexander / Александр Раевский / raevski22@yahoo.com>

Thais Boulanger / boulanger3@gmail.com

Anne Larsen / anne.larsen@khib.no

Juliana Notari / julinotari@yahoo.com.br

Maria Jonsson / maria.jonsson@khib.no

Luana Cardoso da Costa / luana.costta@live.com

Hedi Jaansoo / hedi.jaansoo@khib.no

Alex Barbosa / miag27@yahoo.com.br

Leo Shumba / leo.shumba@khib.no

Nena Balthar / nbalthar@gmail.com

Malin Peter / malin.peter@khib.no

Marina Fraga / marinafraga00@gmail.com

Hidemi Nishida / hdmnsd@gmail.com

Mayra Martins Redin / mayraredin@gmail.com

Trine Friis / trinehylanderfriis@gmail.com