Peacocke/ Bagg/ Swoboda - Waves & Lines

Waves & Lines is a 50-minute multimedia song cycle for soprano, electronics and chamber ensemble. The album is based on a collection of Afghan women's folk poems called landays. These poems are passed down secretly as a sung oral tradition and were collected and translated by Eliza Griswold in the book I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from contemporary Afghanistan. Exploring the distance, anonymity and strange intimacy of phone calls, text messages, and radio broadcasts in which the poems are shared, the song cycle features the use of fixed electronics and projections. Gemma Peacocke is a US-based composer from New Zealand. She combines acoustic instruments and voices with electronics, and her work often has a sociopolitical focus. As well as her concert works, Gemma often collaborates with choreographers, theatre practitioners, and artists, including with Australian director Benita de Wit and multimedia artists Anchuli Felicia King and Xuan. She has also collaborated with renowned choreographers Sylvain Émard and Ros Warby and Afghani artist Kubra Khademi.