lazy river by mira calix

lazy river by mira calix

https://vimeo.com/433230767

lazy river by Mira Calix was created as a download release to accompany her range of #calixagainstcovidcloth face masks, exclusive to Bleep, in aid of Medact and Doctors of the World. The track itself is a hyper-collage made from hundreds of clips collated from Twitter as the pandemic took hold, all set to a pounding drum loop, chronicling the world-wide responses to Covid-19 through the lens of social media. This archive of affectual gleanings are then disjunctively interrupted with her own field recordings made on daily walks in the suddenly eerily quiet suburban town in which she is based. The track seethes with a righteous anger and overtly political energy; the return to nature glimpsed in her recordings is secondary to the pandemonium of the world news cycle that enters the otherwise quiet, private and solitary domain of lock-down Britain.The dense collage starts with singing in Naples and ends with the whistles of Wuhan, via Brazil, Spain, New York, and Germany. Neighbourhoods commune across balconies, blasts of horns sound in support of key workers, pots and pans are thumped for the NHS, nurses plea for PPE, streets erupt in singing, the bells of Notre Dame ring out, doctors state facts and politicians bury them under a theatre of figures, ad-hoc protests spout 5G conspiracies, and the press comment upon comments in overlapping waves of contradiction and virtual noise. These sounds connect us with others through the digital space in a strange solidarity, but also exist in painful contrast to the personal, introverted experience of the unexpected solitude of the newly-reclusive life. The track explores these two separate but simultaneously lived realities; the body is in the localised physical space of hushed emptiness, yet at the same time the second body is simultaneously connected to a ever-changing and highly politicised stream; the world reacting in real time to an unforeseen transformation of the world as we knew it. The track could be understood as an extended advert for the rational of wearing a mask for the foreseeable future; as we gradually return to the outdoors to explore the world as we find it anew. Masks should be routinely washed depending on the frequency of use. Individuals should be careful not to touch their eyes, nose, and mouth when removing their face covering and wash hands immediately after removing.

Uploaded 2020-06-27T23:52:54.000Z Aerials and Satellites Wakefield