Anna Wolfe-Pauly, or ANNA here, is a multidisciplinary artist from California. WARM ANNA is both experiences and exercises focused on expanding the possible listening register. With a super slo-mo sensibility, Anna leads workshops and gatherings internationally that focus on deep listening, time-based aural practices, and exploratory group sound. This collection, WARM, is a CD and booklet gathering some of Anna's works.
"A favorite exercise that Pauline Oliveros shared at many Deep Listening workshops and retreats, the Extreme Slow Song integrates an “Extreme Slow Song” vocal practice she credited to Rafael Liñán, and Oliveros’ “Extreme Slow Walk,” a walking meditation influenced by Elaine Summers’ “Articulated Walk”. Often the Extreme Slow Song was performed without the Extreme Slow Walk. Oliveros never notated the Extreme Slow Song exercise as a text score, but transmitted it orally (with variations) to her students on many occasions over the past ten years." (Notes by Jennifer Wilsey)
The “Extreme Slow Song(s)” are performances of a score written by late composer Pauline Oliveros. These captured experiences feature the voices, untrained but honed by focus and slow attention, wandering across the surface of a song’s structure in curious and shimmering ways. Singers of the listening group were told to walk, one step at a time, one note at a time. Their footsteps flex boards in space, and add to the expansive listening habitat. As much hearing a room as hearing a room hear its occupants. Breath is key.
The core of the sonic program here is a series of exercises, Warm Ups, that display Anna's attention to voice, to language, to listening. Unyolked from a discrete musical practice, this humble voice music is not demanding, but it commands time to unfold. It is simple but in its simplicity offers a multitude of small complexities. Traces of phrases echo and stretch and yawn into and out of themselves. A sort of minimal poetic tai chi or a minimalist revision on the Sacred Harp singing tradition. Repetitive focused speech actions that create a melodic practice with intention and attention.
Anna, alongside collaborator Dorian Braun, visited with the research group Knowing from the Inside led by Timothy Ingold at the University of Aberdeen. Capsules from this conversation are collected in the booklet. Equally poetic, tender, silly, spiritual, academic, activist, naturalist. A spectrum of surfaces and how sounds grace them. Softly expansive and radiating warmth like a voice or a prism.
WARM ANNA is a multimedia invitation to hear the world, really here. It is reliably imperfect, and assuredly unpredictable, but there in that flux it can make music out of anything if you hear close.
edition of 50
CD in DVD case + 18 pg risograph booklet
bandcamp download code
more on Anna Wolfe-Pauly HERE
