ON REFLEXION

ON REFLEXION is a sound installation studying a poem and its performance by slam-poet MC Jabber. Created for a glassed-in hallway in Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, the composition uses multichannel soundspace to map out the characteristics of Jabber’s poem “Welcome”. The words describe a crisis of contemporary criticism, but his lightning, almost super-human reading defies literal comprehension; his torrent of words offers instead a psychic sensation of meaning, and swirling waves of phonemes. Henderson uses this residue of phonetic information to structure the composition: as space, as location and as movement. Words are distributed to speaker locations in the hallway according to their vowel sounds, convolved with one another, and sprayed in dense word-clouds, which are bounced off the large glass surfaces to create a moving 3D soundmap.