Re-engaging with a traumatic experience in the Gothic Quarter in Barcelona, the narrator of Roy Claire Potter's Entrance Song; last time tells their story through foggy wisps of memory, it's a refracted portal laid out and rendered hybrid in form. An ominous, experimental cross-artform publication brought to life by spoken text passages, recorded sound/music and additional visual PDF document.
Rather than directly recounting their experience, the story's narrator focuses instead on Gothic Quarter's architecture, topography, history and people. These details unfurl as weighted shadows of the exterior world that loom over a corrupted memory: a memory that cannot be directly accessed. Accompanying and adding to the text are glimpses of music and field recordings. A piano performance of a piece of sheet music found during a research trip to the Abbey of Santa Maria De Montserrat, field recordings of a violin practice by a fountain and a hidden bass track gift a third eye to the dissociative memory and its surroundings, as well as breathe tonal hues to proceedings. A PDF document includes notes and edits of the text, as well as pictures of the towering churches and spires of the city: overwhelming pieces of architecture with spiked edges and webbed partitions. A fly-trap where words don't tread.
A story instigated and evacuated, one last time.
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Entrance Song; last time was written, read and produced by Roy Claire Potter and includes the following field recordings by Lisa Lavery: Courtyard violin practice drippy fountain Rome; Calle de las Cortesías; Train platform bell Sicily. Hidden track Bass Piece was written, performed and recorded by Lisa Lavery. With special thanks to Bridget Hayden for piano instruction and Sam Mcloughlin for recording advice. Proceeds from the sale of this album will go to Rape Crisis UK and Safenet, a domestic abuse charity in Burnley.
Roy Claire Potter has released duo and solo audio works with labels like Cafe OTO’s Otoroku and Takuroku, Sub Rosa, Chocolate Monk, and Fort Evil Fruit, and has worked with a broad range of musicians and sound artists including Park Jiha, Ziúr, Kieron Piercy and Bridget Hayden. With a visual art background in experimental art writing and drawing, Roy tells stories built from fragmented, intense images that depict moving bodies or domestic scenes and architectural settings, often focusing on group dynamics or the aftermath of violent events with a dark, sometimes wilful humour. They publish writing and make exhibitions internationally, and recent collaborations for stage and broadcast have been made possible by BEK, Counterflows, Reduced Listening for BBC Radio 3, and Wysing Art Centre’s Polyphonic music festival with Somerset House.
