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thembi soddell: sound artist / electroacoustic composer
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"With a fine balance between augmented field recording and machine noise Soddell perfectly controls this exhilarating journey into her unconscious—or is it our own?" Gail Priest, RealTime Arts
Thembi Soddell is a sound artist and electroacoustic composer from Melbourne, Australia. Her volatile sonic worlds morph, shift, rupture and dis-rupture into filmic atmospheres with a distinctly disquieting edge. Contorted into unreal environments and luscious masses of sonic textures, her sound palate sources field recordings, instruments and electronics to be suggestive but often unidentifiable. Her compositions exploit the dynamic extremes, toying with the listener's sense of expectation by generating anticipatory suspense. The key element underlying her work is the exploration of psychological and emotional intensity.
She creates work for recording, installation, live performance, and concert presentation. Her CV includes the release of four major recording projects on CD (including two collaborative albums with Anthea Caddy); works exhibited at the Parisonic Festival (Paris 2011), the National Gallery of Australia (Online 2004) and the SFMOMA (San Francisco 2002); solo performances at Australian experimental music festivals such as the Totally Huge New Music Festival (Perth 2009), What Is Music? (Melbourne 2004) the Liquid Architecture Festival of Sound Art (Auckland 2006, Sydney 2005, Melbourne 2001); and two European tours in duo with Anthea Caddy that included performances at the Hörkunstfestival (Erlangen 2006), Biegungen Festival (Berlin 2009) and Instants Chavirés (Paris 2006).
Alongside Thembi's solo work, she also has an ongoing duo with cellist, Anthea Caddy, and has performed with experimental musicians such as Jakob Brandt-Pedersen, Dave Brown, Tony Buck, Jim Denley, Anthony Pateras, Camilla Hannan, Jerome Noetinger, Philip Samartzis, Joe Talia, and James Wilkinson. Thembi has a BA in Media Arts (2002) and is a graduate with Honours in Sound Art (2005) from RMIT's Fine Art Department, where she is now a PhD candidate. She also assists in running the Australian experimental music label, Cajid Media.
"Soddell's work with dynamics is extremely accomplished, alternately forcing close attention and then rewarding it with shocking explosions of activity that bring any absent-minded trains of thought right back into a brutal present. This strategy is analogous to the remembering of a dream, the recombining of dreamed events into a comprehensible sequence. The work suggests all the uncertainty of a nightmare recounted, with all its gaps and discontinuities of narrative. The virtue of this for the listener is that it will keep you on edge throughout."
Excerpt from Instance CD review written by Michael Day for the Diffusion newsletter distributed by Sonic Arts Network. It can be viewed in full on Michael Day's Blog.
CLICK HERE to view an abridged CV
page last updated: 03/01/12
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