What person from History , women experiences inspire you? How to start with ! Spontaneously I would say, Joan of Arc ,Hildegard von Bingen ,Etti Hillesum . … I have been living with Mary Shelley’s story and writings since the last few years and it has changed my life . She became a creative obsession , a ghost haunting my artistic imagination and questioning my own existence .
Mary doesn’t belong to the past and I feel a profound connection and gratitude towards this visionary and contemporary figure. The underlying issues of her writings including the obsession of Science , the search of Immortality and the philosophical and ecological context that shape her stories fundamentally speak about each of us and address to the complexities of our Human Nature.
She became famous with Frankenstein novel but her neglected later book The Last Man (1826) has the most to say to us in our present moment of crisis and global pandemic. The Last Man is a novel of isolation: an isolation that reflected Shelley’s painful circumstances.
Shelley asks her readers to imagine a world in which only humans are becoming extinct. Attacked by a new, unstoppable plague, the human population collapses within a few years. Shelley continues to haunt me.
The compositions of my album “The Waking Dream” are inspired by” 1816 ,The year without Summer” when the young Mary Shelley imagined her novel Frankenstein.
At the time Shelley wrote most prolifically, the world had been plunged into semi-darkness, crop-failure, famine, and a significant increase in riots, murders, and fatal illnesses by the cataclysmic eruption of Mount Tambora, in Indonesia. In this time of Global Pandemic and Grief, looking back to the history and collective dramas is a resonating and a learning process. Hopefully, Awareness can open a room for solace and arouse our vital energy.
For each sonic piece, my creative process is the same : the voice is a spatial and dramatic language.
Words and body sounds become layers,textures,sculptural elements inducing trance like movement and images .
This audio project is not a direct,detailed storyline but a meditative exploration awakened by the present echoing to the past events that generate a dystopian vision in which poetry is merging with soundscapes and vocals.
#vocalmusic #vocalexplorations #soniclimbo
Ultimately, Shelley’s novels insists on two things: firstly, our humanity is defined not by art, or faith, or politics, but by the basis of our communities, our fellow-feeling and compassion.
Secondly, we belong to just one of many species on Earth, and we must learn to think of the natural world as existing for its own sake.
We humans, Shelley’s novel makes clear, are expendable.
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” Mary Shelley
Muriel Louveau is a French composer, artist , performer, and singer.
@louveaumuriel
