«I Don’t Want To Be An Individual All On My Own» is the work of Scottish, Amsterdam-based composer-performance and visual artist (and also a bagpipe player) Genevieve Murphy that evokes her powerful personal impressions from her eighth birthday party in the late 1990s, celebrated with the birthday of her mother and with various characters. She offers a rich sonic narrative of that day with her spoken word of the various characters and with local heavyweights like guitarist Andy Moor (of The Ex, and head of the Unsounds label) and sax player John Dikeman on few tracks, and pop songs and electronic dance-driven beats and soundscapes.
From an early age, Murphy developed a fascination for memory, psychology and disability, and in how people relate to each other and create emotional bonds. «I Don’t Want To Be An Individual All On My Own» is her search for a real connection in an all-individualized world. She is balancing on a tightrope between her fear and her curiosity for the unknown and investigates the power of empathy by reflecting on a supposedly ordinary birthday party. Or as she summarized it: «For me to fear you, you must grant to be just, for in less than a moment you tread me to dust, certainly you have no cause for alarm for were I to try, I can do you no harm».
Murphy’s twisted and somewhat bizarre facial expressions – as part of the visual art – invites the listener to engage with the inner thoughts and voices of a child who begins to realize the emotional complexities of the adult world and the strangeness of everyone in her life. This moving, poetic work suggests an insightful perspective on the universal question of how to relate to others, and how our own personal memories shape us as individuals. Murphy hopes that the listening experience can be an entrance into a dialogue with the listener’s own thoughts, or as she puts it so beautifully in the song «Living Emotions».
«The forest avoids us without much / resistance / If numb is a feeling, / If tranquility is screaming / It tells us we’re weaving / Through social healing / Roots are forming / Social media is warming / To the instincts of aloneness / In a connected world / Not understanding / our rootless existence / The forest avoids us / without much resistance / Socially important, / But self is crucial / The forest is made of / one body that’s youthful / Connection is visible / beneath the earth / Can’t be understood / by a human’s worth / Not understanding our rootless / existence / The forest avoids us / without much resistance / Insecurities that plague us / To follow ourselves / We scare one another / When we move alone / A rootless existence / The forest fears / Our unsettled persistence».
Eyal Hareuveni
Genevieve Murphy (v, sound design, perf.), John Dikeman (s), Andy Moor (g), Marta Warelis (p), Henning Luther (dr), Le Schnigg (elec. beats), Joel Thurman (sound design)
