In her ongoing Aisteach project, composer Jennifer Walshe subverts archival practices to sound out the gaps and absences in the history of modernist music. In AMRA, his new collaboration with filmmaker Imran Perretta, multidisciplinary artist Paul Purgas draws on historical sound and images of the South Asian diaspora. In conversation with sound archivist Andrea Zarza Canova and writer Frances Morgan, they discuss how working with official and unofficial archives informs their practices.
Jennifer Walshe and Paul Purgas (as one half of AMRA) will both be presenting new collaborative works as part of ASSEMBLY on Sat 17 Nov 2018.
Frances Morgan is a writer based in London. Currently researching histories of electronic music at the Royal College of Art, she is a contributing editor at The Wire magazine.
Andrea Zarza Canova is a archivist and curator at the British Library Sound Archive, who has worked with Studio artists including Paul Purgas, Imran Peretta and Larry Achiampong. She has also worked with the London Musicians’ Collective Archive and Special Collections Centre, at the Deep Listening Institute (USA) and at the Pacific Radio Archives (USA). Andrea has curated listening spaces with archival sound recordings as part of David Byrne’s Meltdown Festival and the No Play! exhibition at nGbK (Berlin, Germany) and produced radio programmes for NTS Radio and RRS Radio Reina Sofía. Her record label, Mana Records, run with Matthew Kent, publishes works at the intersection of contemporary and archival sound.