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OOR_Scintilla is the collaborative sound art practice of Louisa Love + Clive McLachlan Powell.
OOR_Scintilla are an Edinburgh-based artist duo working with the material poetics of sound, voice and place. They work improvisationally with numerous forms of resonance across processes of field recording, musical performance, sculptural production, objects, electronics and the voice to produce environmentally-responsive audio works exploring hybrid and unstable conditions.
Drawing on ancient origins, local and folkloric narratives, they are interested in the gestures and enigmatic territories that interconnect bodies, places, histories, technologies and natural phenomena, engaging with sounding and listening as acts of embodied archaeological research. The duo have come to define themselves through a humble and intuitive approach which employs only the environment, the human voice, the physicality of materials and traditional instruments as raw material. These form the basis for an unsettled sonic dialogue rooted in multichannel natures and the wilding of latent identities.
'OOR' is a sonorous acronym derived from the sound of resonating clay and what the artists have together defined as 'object oriented resonance', a haptic and sonic process of enquiry into object-led ontologies.
OOR_Scintilla present work through broadcasts, performances, sited projects + exhibitions including: FOIK FLAW, Sett Studios, Edinburgh (2022); Radiophrenia, CCA Glasgow (commissioned radio production, 2020); Whiteadder: Heart of the Lammermuirs project, Whiteadder Water Valley, East Lothian with AOC Archaeology (2020); Moonah Community Radio, Tasmania, AUS (programmed by Sisters Akousmatica, (2019); Noisy Familiars & Settle Doon, Settlement Projects, Edinburgh (2019); CitricACID, Embassy Gallery, Edinburgh (2018).
Read a Q+A with OOR_Scintilla here as part of their Fog Theory radio guest mix
Bandcamp | Soundcloud | Facebook | Instagram
The Whiteadder Tapes | 2020
The Whiteadder Tapes album is the culmination of a sonic archaeology project undertaken by OOR_Scintilla in response to new mapping and excavational research led by AOC Archaeology in the Whiteadder Water Valley, Scottish borders for the Whiteadder: Heart of the Lammermuirs community project 2019-2020 whiteadder.aocarchaeology.com
Composed solely from field recordings, instrument sound and the human voice, the record is an exploration of acoustic ecology and the territories between environmental, human and technological presences in the context of local history and folk narrative.
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Listen + download at oorscintilla.bandcamp.com
Also available as a limited edition CD | FREE. £3.00 P+P.
6-panel digipak cover with 12 page booklet featuring sonographic + photographic imagery from the Whiteadder project. Designed by OOR_Scintilla.
Order via email to oorscintilla@gmail.com
unknown thirds | Radiophrenia 2020
A new radiophonic composition continuing OOR_Scintilla’s dialogue around materialities of intimacy, distance, ‘live’ and recorded dynamics. Ancient spiritual apotropaic markers found within churches and standing stones or ritualistic gestures of contact are taken as reference points for seeking out unknown ‘third’ presences within landscapes, weathers, voices and the making and playing of instruments.
The work incorporates a number of new sited and remotely realised performances recorded along waterways and forests in and beyond Edinburgh, as well as reworked/unheard material from OOR_Scintilla’s recent album project The Whiteadder Tapes situated in the Lammermuir Hills.
voice, crwth, harmonium, violin, hurdy gurdy, gongs, DIY aeolian harps and horns, field recordings, infra- and ultra-sonics, hydrophonics, electromagnetics
proxims astrayed | 2019
'proxims, astrayed' is an experimental composition for radio drawing on interests in radio’s potential to bring traces of otherness into a space of live, intimate perception. Composed almost entirely of residual sounds and improvisational gestures, steps, breaths, mutters, bowings, lost speech and songs of the untrained voice are paralleled with stray electromagnetic signals amongst modulated coastal recordings, to foreground the proximal shifts between presences of land, body and technology. The piece’s broken pattern of call and response particularly hints at a negotiation that is taking place between the positionings and territories of male, female and other voices.
Broadcast at Moonah Community Radio(MCR)programme, Tasmania, Australia (2019) curated by Sisters Akousmatica.
states found in weather | Edinburgh College of Art, 2019
states found in weather is a collaborative polyphonic performance installation synthesising live and recorded sound, music, voice, text, visuals, sculptural speaker objects and self-made acoustic instruments. Broken and breathy vocal systems roam amongst elemental sounds, humble folk inflections and slippery electronic interactions, to mark out a shifting gestural environment of resonant accumulations. Developed for the West Court at Edinburgh College of Art during the MFA Degree Show 2019.
Jumbled Airs #1 live-to-air radio performance | Radiophrenia 2019
Jumbled Airs #1 is a sound work synthesising wind, water, ecstatic pylons, breathy bodily systems, broken narrations, bowed objects and DIY aeolian harps into a transient song of confused communicative air currents. Inspired by the distanced intimacies of radio transmission, as well as its underlying potentials for disturbance/resistance, destabilized acts of breathing, speaking, addressing and sounding are combined with the physical resonance of objects and elements to point towards a reclaiming of the materialities of sonic exchange that is based in transient bodies, thoughts, gestures and places.
