Mouth of the Marble

Mouth of the Marble is an EP of five audiovisual pieces — Oil Tongue · The Water Refused My Name · Pink Disease / Dancing Plague · I Was a Room Before I Was a Woman · Marble Eats the Sky — in which the Ebru tray is treated as a mouth: a wet surface that takes in pigment, holds it, and speaks it back as pattern. Each piece pairs a composed electronic track, built around my voice, with footage of marbling filmed from above and digitally processed until the ink seems to breathe.

The five tracks are tuned to a single centre, D, which the last piece finally lets slip down a semitone. The voice is never on top of the music; it sits inside it — whispered, sung, stretched into drones and cut into the small rhythmic fragments the titles suggest: a tongue that is oily and will not articulate, water that refuses a name, the two plagues of colour and movement, a room that was a woman, a marble that eats the sky. The images are not illustrations of the sound but its other half: what the ink does, the electronics do, and vice versa.

It is the first album-length work to come out of the Ebru research, and the closest it has come to pop — five short pieces, each with a hook, each with a face.