I Kept the Voice You Left Behind

I Kept the Voice You Left Behind was commissioned by Nicholas Isherwood for his series The Electric Voice 2026–27. It lasts about sixteen minutes and explores the persistence of the human voice beyond the body that produces it.

The electronics act as spectral residues of the performer’s own sound — recorded, transformed and returned — gradually detaching from the live voice and beginning to occupy the performance space independently. What the performer hears from the four loudspeakers is a version of himself, hollow and displaced. The video presents a second body: a close-up of the singer, filmed before the performance, that appears simultaneously present and absent. As the piece progresses the synchrony between the live body and its recorded image is systematically broken — the video mouth moves without sound, the live voice speaks without image, the recorded phrase returns in the wrong order. The piece asks which body is the real one.

The central phrase — I kept the voice you left behind — is introduced as a whispered seed in the opening section, fragments across a long fracture zone, is sung once, dry and whole, at the centre of the piece, and is then taken over by the loudspeakers, which speak it themselves while the singer listens. It returns at the close as pure breath: the vowel shape of the word voice without phonation. The title is realised literally — the voice outlasts the body that held it. The score is read left to right in horizontal bands, proportionally, against the fixed playback; the voice is treated as an unstable object, moving between speech, resonance and breath without hierarchy, and the electronics are not accompaniment but another body in the room.

Nicholas Isherwood gave the world premiere at Meng Concert Hall, California State University Fullerton, on 7 April 2026, followed by performances at Unerhörte Musik, Berlin, and at the BİLGİ New Music Festival in Istanbul.