thingNY – a sense of Dear Nancine
released digitally on November 5th, 2021
In May 2021, thingNY presented a new piece called Dear Nancine as part of the Look + Listen Festival: At Home Edition. 131 people from all over the US signed up for free tickets to participate, and each audience member received nine pieces of mail from members of thingNY over the course of the month. This EP contains two of the audio portions of the larger work – “Losing a Sense of the Map” and “Dominance and the Removal of Dominance”.
“Losing a Sense of the Map” was conceived by Gelsey, who cooked up a process that could be described as “exquisite corpse meets theme and variations.” She created a short track that featured several audio layers, then sent it with stems to Dave, who could edit or delete layers and add his own layers. He sent it to Isabel (who only had access to Dave’s version, not Gelsey’s original), and so on, until all eight of us got a crack at it. The result is winding journey with various twists and turns through the expanse of eight composer-performers. In Dear Nancine, this audio was used as an accompaniment for map making exercises, and selected segments were used as materials for a soundwalk.
For Dominance, Andrew recorded a rather dominant audio track and sent it around to all of us. Each of us recorded new audio along with the dominant track, then sent these new tracks back to Andrew. Andrew took the new tracks and layered them on top of each other in different configurations, but always with the original dominant track removed. Elements of this process were also heard on the soundwalk, and were included as the audio in a video segment that Erin created.