Mélissa Lavabre grew up in a tiny village in the South of France then landed in this strange place in 1996 at the age of 17, a sharp contrast to her homeland yet bearing similarities with its vegetation and climate. While the oak trees, sage, raccoons and coyotes of Los Angeles are comforting to her, the co-existing industrial aspects of L.A. also fascinate her. Mostly self-taught, she identifies as a neurodiverse, outsider artist and with all the mediums she has sifted, she is mainly interested in textures, impressions, and documenting both the inner and outer worlds. She seeks to experience and capture the fleetingness and the passing of time through her explorations and collections.
Artist Location: Los Angeles , LA
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PARTICIPATION
Roaming presentation with Eric Basta:
Meanderthals
A couple of meandering Meanderthals will stroll throughout the space, producing various sounds as they travel in costume – part troubadours, part jesters, part moving installations, activating the space briefly with new textures as they move along.
soundscapes On-site June 1st and online June 9th
Found Sound Station #1
My father with his Buddhist learnings drilled in me that “everything is impermanence”. Nowhere is this more apparent than with sound – so ephemeral, so intangible, instantly vanishing. These are aural scenes that caught my attention for one reason or another. Funny voices, an unexpected harmony produced by a machine, the juxtaposition of many simultaneous happenings. They each tell a story even when they are all rather ordinary scenes. Some are pleasant, some are unpleasant, just the sound of passing life, different scenes I was observing, featuring the voices of loved ones and the voices of strangers, trains, machines, the radio in the background, birds, and more… I am not a professional sound recordist, I just zone out on sounds. Most of these were collected on my Zoom H2. This collection was presented last year at soundpedro in installation form.
Tortured Monkey #1
Torture is a certain mood, best not to dwell there too long, but three minutes can help get it out of the system.
earmaginations [silent videos] On-site June 1st and online June 9th
Stroboscopic self
Self-absorbtion to the point of dissolution. In love with petty selves that are just actually immaterial specks that vanish so quickly.
Found Sound Station
Come have a seat and travel places with me! Sit down, let the speakers tell you a story. This is my aural slide show, collected sounds from various strolls and explorations. Come get immersed in some of the places I’ve been, from the K-Mart in Burbank to the ferry dock in Plymouth, and many places in between. Enjoy my variety show of moments and times captured in some of my documentarian hunts for fleeting impressions. (Last night, I had a dream I was wearing a crop top that read in Sharpie-written font “DOCUMENTARIAN”)
Impressions 1
Zoning out, droning out. Shifting, modulating sounds, layering sounds to form new sounds, slow and quiet pace. This one is for contemplatives and minimalists.
Soundscapes [audio tracks] On-site June 3rd and online June 11th
K-Mart Key Me
One of my favorite activities is to stroll around and record sound scenes I find interesting with my little Zoom recorder. This recording was captured at the K-Mart in Burbank around 2016. It is the KeyMe machine duplicating a key. Time stops for me as I become hyper aware of all the sounds and nothing but the sounds. Found sounds offer a unique fleeting quality, they capture a time and place aurally, that can never be repeated exactly. Random sounds are juxtaposed like radio stations playing at once. Here, it’s “Tell It To My Heart” in the background store speakers, a conversation between a mother and daughter, the beeps of the cash register, and of course the star of the show, the KeyMe machine and its unique harmonics. This recording is unaltered, unfiltered, just a documentation of getting my keys duplicated one afternoon of 2016 in Burbank at K-Mart. As dull and ordinary an event it is, it is still completely unique.
Flagstaff Train Crossing
I love the sounds of American trains. There is a certain quality in their tones, a sort of nostalgic, obsolete, haunting timbre that I imagine partially unchanged since the 1800s. Departures, comings and goings, transportation of goods and people and news across the immense land… This recording is of the train crossing in Flagstaff, one summery Saturday night somewhere around 2014, captured in one of my hunts for fleeting impressions.
Earmaginations [silent videos] On-site June 3rd and online June 11th
Water and Light #1
Abstraction can be found all around. We only perceive a human version of reality through our unique human perceptors, our unique human senses and brain translation of the vast mysterious universe. If we were a fly, a speck of dust, an octopus, you name it, our perception of reality would be very different. At times, things can present themselves in a more abstract form than usual. Perhaps we notice the textures in particular, the way light plays with a surface, patterns, etc. Here I became entranced with the interplay of sun, sound and water.
Water and Light #2
Colored lights of the night city, constant flow, rain drops blurring the shapes of things, contours getting diffused. Abstraction and wonder found driving through busy, rainy L.A. Ordinary. Extraordinary. Just light and water and movement.
As Méli(ssa) Lava(bre)
Fatiguée
Seeking to convey my state of tiredness through sound itself rather than meaning, while actually using a word that DOES mean “tired” – “fatiguée” – but ridding it of its conventional use, making that irrelevant (I could just as well have repeated the word “pumpkin” or most any sequence of phonemes) to only express its sensation in my body.
xDiscourse on Sound Poetry – Part 2
Part 2 of 4 of Discourse on Sound Poetry in sound poem form.
