F R E A K _ F L O O D S

Click here for F R E A K Floods Performances in October 2017: In Belfast and Cambridge

INTRO / DESCRIPTION

We do not arrive in one piece. We can be both at once, oh sure,
but we’re coming off in crumbs. Fewer pixels arrive every time.
Someday there will be nothing left to dust off the tablecloth.
You’ll squint at a screen & wonder.

F R E A K FLOODS is a text-sound collaboration between writer/vocalist Emily DeDakis (USA) & harper/sonic artist Úna Monaghan (Ireland), combining live improvised performance with recorded soundscape. Spoken word mingles with sung moments, electronic sound collage & improvised harp accompaniment to bring lost people & geopolitical shifts to lyrical life. It’s a skewhiff symphony in ten movements — a hymn for a flooded city, a lullaby for a missing brother & an immigrant’s post-Brexit prayer. On the surface it’s about the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland & the United States of America; flickering below is a spectrum of possible places in between & the impossibility of keeping still.

This collaboration premiered at Moving On Music’s JamJar series #5 (September 2016 at the Black Box, Belfast). DeDakis & Monaghan see F R E A K FLOODS as a piece in flux: experimenting with sound’s potential to fracture location & time, with the mix of American idiom & traditional Irish music, & with the overlap of fixed & improvisational aspects.

Dedicated to Mike Teevee, the patron saint of teleportation & impatience with being in one place at a time.

Photo by Ian Barry

OTHER NOTES

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot — One song is an African-American spiritual & an English national sporting anthem?

There is such a thing as the wrong side of an ocean.
& it’s not like the tracks. Yet it might be more crossable.

Everything I knew about The Troubles was from afar.
Everything I knew about New Orleans was before the flood.

This summer I was far away when things were happening here that I couldn’t imagine.
I was reading a book called The Slide Area, by an Englishman living in Los Angeles, coming to terms with landslides & cliff falls.
The way that a house can be there & then not.

The text on this page is by Emily DeDakis
http://www.haveyouthoughtabout.co.uk/writing/