To Slow Down Time To Slow Down

2020



Stereo audio, duration 4 minutes

Images: Tim Etchells

To Slow Down Time To Slow Down is an audio work first presented in Vitrine’s Sounding Off 2.0 online exhibition in August 2020. Following the lead of Etchells’ ongoing experiments in performance and installation using repetition, transformation and layering of vocal loops the work explores the phrase ’to slow down time’ which, through the appearance of mini pauses in performance delivery soon morphs back and forth into the injunction ’time to slow down’. The phased layering of Etchells’ vocal improvisation creates additional complexities, such that the beginning of one version of the phrase on one stereo channel can be completed, interrupted or echoed by a word or words from the other. In the piece Etchells continues to explore the relation between spoken language as semantics and spoken language as musicality, texture and rhythm, creating a space where the form and content of the work are in deep dialogue. Indeed, in the latter parts of the work Etchells intervenes further in the recordings, digitally slowing the text in all of the accumulated sound layers so that the key proposal in the content of the work is mirrored in its material presentation.