Blue on Blue

This work is intended for a six-channel set-up (three sets of stereo speakers) with "Odysseus", "Athena" and "Nausicaa" each being played out of a set of two speakers. The track "Blue on Blue" is a stereo rendering of all three tracks for those that can't achieve the six-channel dream :)

nb. see set-up instructions & diagram

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ABOUT

"What did the Greeks admire in Odysseus? Above all, his capacity for lying . . . the ability to be whatever he chose." - Neitzsche

Blue on Blue is a six-channel sound work that takes as its starting point an episode from Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey - the second oldest poem in Western literature.
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Odysseus has been washed up on the shores of Phaecia, encrusted with salt from the Aegean sea, hides between two thorn bushes. He has already spent years trying to find his way home after having won fame fighting for the Greek army in its bloody defeat of the Trojans. Athene, the goddess who loves him best, has been working to intervene in his fate. She visits the dreams of a local princess, Nausicaa: “Oh Nausicaa! So Lazy! But your mother should have taught you! Your clothes are lying there in dirty heaps, though you will soon be married.” Scheming, Athene tells her to travel to the shore with a party of slave girls, knowing that Nausicaa will encounter the lost, salty Odysseus.

Odysseus, “Just as a mountain lion trusts its strength [when] beaten by the rain and wind, and hunger drives it on,” approaches the group of girls, determined to survive. The slave girls scatter; only Nausicaa has the courage to remain. And for a moment Odysseus is at her feet, entirely dependent on her charity and the mercy of the of Athene, goddess of War.
We might - very anachronistically - read this as an episode of surprising and unstable reciprocities between nature, culture and divine intervention. Heroic masculinity is on the back foot, hungry, lurking on a shoreline that divides the animal and the domestic. Dominion over culture’s limits (which Odysseus, appearing as a lion, is trying to cross) is commanded by Nausicaa, a young girl at her country’s border, out of her father’s reach, under the spell of the goddess Athene.

In Blue on Blue, Laurance draws on this ambiguous moment in the Odyssey to structure an alternative vision of the relations between the voice, the lyric and the self. Weaving sampled Greek orthodox chant and bells with lyrical gestures towards Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Beyonce, Laurance takes on for herself the voices of Athene, Odysseus and Nausicaa and refigures them into three vocal archetypes. Their interactions stand as a series of partial, broken mediations between voices that yearn for, encircle and falteringly promise to touch the driving hope of 20th century popular culture: an unmediated relationship between the individual self and truth. As cultural theorist Fred Jameson writes, this was the promise of “a vision of self integrated beyond the contingencies of the fallen world of the historical present, in a realm in which meaningful action is at once more possible, in which means and ends are at one and henceforth never to be disjoined.”

Laurance’s three vocal strains seem propelled by homeward-longings that vie with each other for primacy in truth and meaning both through, and beyond, the historical circumstances that yielded them. One voice, with a California dustbowl spontaneity already filtered through a 1960s counterculture lens, tells us: “I’ve been all over this land / I’ve dreamed your face in the sand / over and over.” From another channel, a Greek orthodox choir offers up prayers whose ancientness threatens to claim priority. As the song progresses, a contemporary pop archetype emerges, and with it a new prayer for the autonomy and supremacy of the self (“’cos I woke up like this / with my girls / we be fucking flawless”), a new domain of truth asserts itself, unsettling the rest. By splitting Homer’s focus on Odysseus’s longing for his home island into three equally strong but competing claims to an originary truth, Laurance draws us towards homes that cannot all be home, either hers or ours.

This struggle is further complicated by Laurance’s choice to use only the female vocal archetypes. While the canonised representatives of originary truth tend, in the West, to be male, Laurance’s female archetypes sometimes challenge, sometimes mimic, masculinist rhetorical modes. Odysseus, reimagined through ‘60s folk, is a doubled vocal drag, with Laurance’s wavering vibrato singing themes for the (male) folk canon: I was a good time ramblin man / sailor’s joy and whiskey from a can”; yet Nausicaa draws on pop-feminist R&B to establish her position (“I’m a queen bee”).

In occupying these contradictory positions, Laurance does not, I think, seek to transcend the masculinist dominance over the way we envision the self’s homecoming by taking on that virtue for which Nietzsche tells us that Greeks readers praised Odysseus - “the ability to be whatever [s]he chose” (also, the presiding virtue of late liberal capitalism). Instead, she makes a feminist proposal for a lyrical beauty (and truth) that depends inherently on incompleteness: on the self’s interminable struggle with the fallen world of historical time, and on a potent grief at the constraints of patriarchal power.

In Blue on Blue, Laurance sings the yearning she finds at the centre of this ancient incompleteness, and invites us in.

Text by Matthew Drage