Helen Thorington: North Country

Helen Thorington: North Country (1995)

(p) 1995 Helen Thorington. All rights reserved.

A North Country mystery that uses short blocks or fragments of texts to shape a web of linked ideas circling around the skeleton of an unidentified woman found near a North Country (upstate New York) lake. The cast of characters includes a forensics expert, a lawyer, a dead woman, Simon Says and Wittgenstein. With an original sound score by the artist with Guy Klucsevik accordion, Elise Kermani, voice, and Helen Thorington, processing and production.

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Longer Radio Works and Recordings

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Biography

HELEN THORINGTON (Brookline, MA) is the Executive Director of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. (aka Ether-Ore), the founder and producer of the national weekly radio series, New American Radio (1985-1998), and the Turbulence and Somewhere web sites.

Thorington is a writer, sound composer, and radio producer whose documentary, dramatic, and sound works have been aired nationally and internationally for the past twenty years. She has also created compositions for film and installation that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, Ars Electronica, the Whitney Biennial, and in the Whitney Museum's Annual Performance Series. Recently she performed her own sound composition with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company at Jacobs Pillow.

Thorington has produced three narrative works for the web including Solitaire, which combines games and storytelling; and she played a principal artistic role in the cutting-edge net work Adrift most recently presented as a performance and installation at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. She is also a seasoned speaker on radio and net art. Visit her web site!

Long Radio Works and Recordings

Parker's MUD Journals, Parts 1 & 2 (1995/96)

A beginner's odyssey into the text-based on-line communities known as MUDs and MOOs. As Parker tries to learn how to communicate with the computer and the people he (or is it she?) encounters in text-designed living rooms, libraries, and coat closets, an on-line world comes to life that is very much about role playing, social interaction, and FUN. With a performance narrative and a large-scale original score that express in sound and music the animated print-expressions on the computer screen.

The Hunt is on: Reflections on the
Human Genome Project (1994)

A documentary work on the federally supported Human Genome Project. "I intended an entirely other kind of production - a sort of associative drama with satirical overtones, but when I inquired, I found very few people know what the Human Genome Project is, let alone what impact it is already having on us. And satire is impossible without shared knowledge. So here's some information. And here's hoping, that at a time when health concerns are national concerns, the questions raised by this production will be treated seriously." (Thorington) Interview participants include: Dr. Ruth Hubbard of Harvard University, co-author of the book, Exploding the Gene Myth; Dr. Daniel Callahan, President of the Hastings Center, Briarcliff Manor, New York; Dr. Barbara Katz Rothman of Baruch University, author of The Tentative Pregnancy; and Dr. Steven Hilgartner of the Center for the Study of Society and Medicine at Columbia University.

Going Between (1993)

A hypertext fiction for radio about consciousness and the imagination; how thought and language materialize in the world; how we perceive, understand and communicate the nature of our existence, and what we define as "reality". Composed of a series of discrete yet linked stories, musics, geographies, word plays, and quotes that take place both in a real (fictional) world and a (fictional) virtual world. It's materials are earthquakes, mud and MUDS [on-line text-based virtual spaces]; dungeons and underground passages, worms and wormholes, black holes and white holes, and the idea of "going between". Going Between is the original from which the larger work Going Between -- One Word at a Time\ Docs**(created with Jacki Apple) evolved. Produced for ORF, Austria, and Transit.

In the Devils Footsteps, Parts 1 & 2 (1993)
With writer Sarah Montague

Created especially for Halloween, these two complimentary programs celebrate and explore the vampire tradition, which is as ageless and enduring as its own subject, and the shadowy world of the bat, which though its popularity is on the rise, is still very much of an endangered species. The first part recreates the image of the vampire through dramatic readings from the rich literary tradition of vampire lore, and a lush compelling sound score. The second part focuses on the bat, a mysterious creature as fascinating in its own way as the mythological creation which, since Bela Lugosi first lifted his cape in 1931, has literally cast a shadow over its life. Bat experts Dr. Merlin Tuttle, founder of Bat Conservation International, and Dr. Roy Horst, discuss bat behavior and bats' vital ecological contributions, as well as the nature of true vampires.

Story Space (1993)

An audio essay by Thorington on her non-textual work for radio. It includes: (1) an excerpt from Loco-motive (5:20). (2) Dracula's Wives (8:30), and (3) an excerpt from Terra dell'Imaginazione (Landscape of the Imagination) (3:10).

Partial Perceptions (1991/92)

Cinematic audio that works on different perceptual levels. Its underlying concerns are closely linked to the reshaping of traditional concepts of nature, woman, and machine.

Terra dell'Imaginazione (Land of the Imagination) (1990)

A sound composition in which the artist evokes a landscape and tells a story without a text. Originally commissioned as an audio installation for a riverside cave in Mattera, Italy, Terra reflects the artist's view of the place for which it was intended but which she had not as yet seen: wet, quiet, and dark but inhabited by multitudes of insects and small mammals. The story is that of a solitary person paddling through these waters.

Hard City Rock -- New York City in Sound (1987)

With radio documentarian Regine Beyer. Resounds with the energy, excitement and noise of one of the U.S.'s largest metropolitan areas. The piece opens at South Ferry as the morning commuters arrive; it moves on to the Fulton Fish Market, Wall Street, and Chinatown in lower Manhattan; then on to Times Square and Central Park, and ends at a block party in East Harlem. A flow of sounding images interrupted by short informative and anecdotal comments from Robert Bennon of the Environmental Protection Agency. An environmental composition with an unusual twist.

Building a Universe, Part 2: Rifts, Absences
and Omissions (1987)

Satiric and experimental new drama that focuses on the new reproductive technologies and the scientists responsible for their development. "I will get a Nobel, I will..." While shaped into dramatic scenes, the text is based on the actual statements and writings of scientists. Providing associational and causal links between sounds (an old record, semi-military aerobic exercises, textbook lessons on female infanticide and the new technologies), Building a Universe creates an incredibly funny and disturbing picture of an active and unregulated new science, preparing a future with unexpected and undiscussed implications.

Building a Universe, Part 1 (1985)

Outrageous, and at times downright silly, an experimental new drama that focuses on contemporary technologies, such as cloning, cross-breeding, and the ability to exchange body parts.

Shorter Radio Works

Recipe for a Lark (1992) (1:42)

With vocalist Shelley Hirsch. It's a lark!

Dracula's Wives (1992) (12:00)

An otherworldly geography peopled by the disembodied voices of the undead; a radio film, at times operatic in its approach, about women vampires, their bond with the vampire of all vampires, and their unending lust for that "juice of the rarest quality" -- the blood of the living. With the vampire voices of Pamela Z and Agnieszka Waligorska, and the cello of Deidre Murray. Produced for RNE, Spain.

Loco-motive (1992) (12:00)

An electronic environment impervious to the hurried, energetic movements of the many little engines that scuttle back and forth across it. Based on the artist's sound score for a work of the same name by Suzan-Lori Parks.

Aphids and Others (1990) (8:00)

Written in response to the aggressive behavior of Gregory Whitehead's Male Digger Bees, this short work is a humorously poignant appeal for sexual diversity and choice. It features a variety of sexually active creatures, including a laughing aphid, three bumping snails, and an octopus arm that swims.

In the Dark (1990) (6:30)

Audio images that evoke an unpeopled, cinematic geography. A landscape of loneliness and loss.

Congruent Appeal (1989) (18:00)

An experimental drama composed entirely of sound -- musical, electrical, vocal, environmental-- most of it processed and organized into events that are not necessarily related, although their placement may suggest some sort of narrative. Someone is definitely getting squashed in the great technological machine!

One to Win (1989) (10:00)

A short, humorous, audio art work that recreates a single event in a horse-racing day. Presented from many perspectives, including that of the horse, One to Win carries the listener quickly from one location to another -- the announcer's booth, the betting hall, the racetrack, the horse's stall -- as it presents the victorious race of Cold Spot, a bay gelding from Yukon by Smart Helen. The sounds range from the hushed movements of horses alone in their stalls to the tremendous visceral heave of their lungs as they plunge toward the finish line.

Commissioned by New Music America '89, Miami.

Straight Ahead (1989) (11:00)

Originally created for the award winning experimental film Optic Nerve by Barbara Hammer, a work about the filmmaker's grandmother. Thorington's sound score takes its title from the question, "Straight ahead, Grandma?" repeated by the filmmaker as she pushes her grandmother around the hospital in a wheelchair. In the fragmented context of the score, the phrase, repeated by the grandmother, "Yes, Barbara, straight ahead," becomes a metaphor for endurance.

Fiddling Around (1987) (3:56)

A tiny monkey escapes his cage and is pursued by other monkeys and his keepers. A true story out of Monkey Jungle, Miami, told with monkey screeches and fiddle music.

Natural Classic(1987) (1:10)
Drop-in cock-a-doodle-doo. Music for cello and rooster.

Parrot Talk (1987) (5:00)

Controlled insanity in sound. A work about repetition and entropy. Told with live recordings from Parrot Jungle, Miami, feedback, carnival music, static and other anathema of the broadcast world. Winner of First Prize in Macrophon '91, the First International Festival of Radio Art, Woclaw, Poland.

The American Buffalo (1980) (2:00)

Why the American buffalo is not a true buffalo but a bison. And what we may learn from this ancient creature.

The Dream Sequence, Parts 1 &2 (1979) (5:58)

One of the first compositions for radio to make use of electronic processing, The Dream Sequence unfolds associationally, its lyrical text reflecting humorously on the author's rural experience and her concern for personal disappearance.

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