The composer featured in The Wire 447 gives an exclusive experimental vocal performance from her home in Chinatown, New York
“[Charmaine] Lee’s performance strategy centres three things: presence, real-time music-making and risk-taking,” writes Joshua Minsoo Kim in The Wire 447. The New York based composer not only gives uninhibited bodily vocal improvisations, she also employs the use of digital effects to further extend her own sonic possibilities, working by the rule that each performance is in service of what it is she's trying to express. “I want to express myself in a way that... isn’t simply in pursuit of representation and recognition,” Lee told Joshua Minsoo Kim, “where there’s some sort of capital that comes with how well you can stylistically represent something as opposed to just doing you.”
This filmed performance was recorded especially for The Wire at Lee's home in New York on 17 April 2021.
Read Lee's Wire interview in full inside issue 447. Subscribe to read online. Charmaine Lee’s KNVF is released by Erratum Musical.
