www.julesgimbrone.com
The schism between the moment of movement and perception of the point of change.
Over the last ten years, I have carried my fifty-pound, 1980s, Dokorder reel-to-reel with me from Northampton, MA, to Brooklyn, NY, to Pittsburgh, PA, to Lama, NM, to Los Angeles, CA. This hefty, archaic object allowed me time away from digital media to confront my own voice and instruments sometimes in the company of close friends. There, our breaths amplified in our headphones, delayed in the built-in echo, mirrored by haunting traces of previous recordings etched on the tape. Over the last six months, as my body is changing from weekly testosterone injections, I am confronted most acutely by my evolving voice. Sometimes I wake up to a gravelly, hoarse, crackly wisp of a voice, other days I feel my “normal” timbre and tone combined with the simultaneous unease and excitement in the transformations. The body is always an unwieldy instrument. The self is continuously made and unmade, yet the shifts that we can suddenly perceive seem to always hold more weight. For FAULT LINES I wanted to mine these old tapes as a way to locate my formal selves. I recorded over them, cut them up, and pasted them back together. I was perhaps trying to pinpoint moments of shift. Like the imposing heft of the reel-to-reel machine, or the energy capacity of a rock under stress, the body holds time, holds flux, holds something akin to, but never fully, the self.
from
FAULT LINES,
released September 29, 2013
Reel-to-Reel Tape (2003-present)
Performed by Jules Gimbrone - All sounds, instruments, voices
Round - Metal bowls, contact mic, tuning forks (2012)
Performed by Jules Gimbrone with Molly Allis in DRS Studio, CalARTS, May 23rd, 2013
Produced and engineered by Jules Gimbrone in DRS Calarts, May 2013
Mixed by David Paha and Jules Gimbrone