This is a mixing of phonetic and musical systems, expressed through a score and performance, for a decommissioned Army arsenal bunker. The space for this performance once housed US Army munitions from WWII through the Vietnam War. Today the bunkers are empty concrete shells embedded within the landscape and which point toward the complicated histories our built environments make present. In this score, the International Phonetic Alphabet functions as proxy for voices and is used as notes for actions and utterances to be performed. The performance of this score in the bunker fills the space with rhythmic and disembodied sounds and thereby temporarily reclaims the space and its connotations. This image is both score and visual documentation of the vocal and sound performance. The photograph is from the interior of an arsenal bunker in the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie (Will County, Illinois) and the graphic elements are the performance score. The score was written by Adam Farcus and the performance was executed by Adam Farcus and Sarah Aziz inside this bunker on November 28, 2020.
Listen to an audio recording of the performance on SoundCloud.
