inner voices so invasive

"Ogion seldom spoke, and always said less than he meant. But this much he had told the boy, that names have power. And of all the words, the true names of things are the most powerful.”

This quote is from Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy book A Wizard of Earthsea from 1968. In the book, there is a magical story about the power of language, particularly the naming of things. It describes the world as a linguistic construction and the power inherent in naming things. It portrays language as a prerequisite for human existence in the world, thus making the world a narrative. Can we extend this idea to say that human experience is a consequence of language, and thereby language becomes the reason we experience? This fantastic idea endows language with great power, elevating it to a critical level that calls for a general linguistic awareness. So how do we avoid getting stuck in the same narrative about the world, and how can sound processing and the exploration of the weight of language help us challenge prevailing narratives?

‘Inner Voices So Invasive’ finds its foundation in the borderland between the meaning and meaninglessness of language, casting a critical eye on the structure of language and the embedded structures that linguistic formulations uphold. The work treats the precision, discourse, and construction of language with the aim of resetting the relationship to language.

The sonic investigation of speech semantics, prosody, and phonetics forms the basis for all compositions. In a spatialization of fragmented voices, digital textures, and esoteric soundscapes, we find ourselves in a sonic continuum where all elements seem connected in an arbitrary perception of cause and effect. Voices and other musical material feel alien from each other one moment, and the next, they merge into a well-articulated texture. The work blends a collage-like structure with a series of fixed compositions. The language in ‘Inner Voices So Invasive’ does not exist as a product of human experience but precedes it. The incomplete speech and meaningless language, with a gradually dissolved anecdotal property, thus cause a new semantics where tone and texture are equated with vowel and consonant.