Jessica Ekomane was the first visiting practitioner of the 2020 UAL Visiting Practitioner series. She is a Berlin based sound artist and musician that has released her own music in record labels and worked in different sound exhibitions around the world.

Multivocal (2019) – Is Jessica debut LP that was released by Important Records. This piece was inspired by Györgi Ligeti “Poème Symphonique” performance, were Ligeti displays 100 metronomes playing at different BPM’s. Multivocal consist of two melodies in different scales that mirror each other but with a difference of a millisecond in tempo. As the piece progresses the two melodies drift separately creating ever changing polyphonic rhythms, but at the end the both melodies unite in unison as in the beginning. Jessica used Max MSP for this piece and used a digital metronome to create the both melodic lines. It’s intended for a quadrophonic speaker set-up and in the piece Jessica uses different psychoacoustic techniques as compositional development.

Comedown (2020) – This piece was performed in the 2020 Berghain sound installation. The purpose of this piece was to mock and parody the concept of EDM and the popular music industry. In this piece Jessica used different techniques that are characteristic in EDM, she chose to use bass drops and risers without any compositional coherence, by this demonstrating EDM simplistic and superficial ideology. Berghain is a Berlin club that plays music like Techno and IDM, these both genres can contain characteristics that are antagonist to EDM, so the piece suited perfectly to the place were it was performed (Jessica Ekomane, 2020).

Citizen Band (2019) – CB radios were used to interfere communications between truck drivers in the US and record them. Then with those recordings, Jessica created a sound collage that was played in national Austrian radio. This piece has a personal influence from Jessica because her father is a truck driver. Another feature that had the piece is that it exposed the racism used in the truck drivers daily conversations, exposing how big racism is and how normalized it can get to be.

The following video is from the national sound archive of Mexico (Fonoteca Nacional de México, 2014). I chose this video for my introduction because I was deeply interested in the concept of preserving sound as a cultural patrimony, specially from Mexico that is my native country. Their archives contain recordings of historic moments in Mexican history, from speeches of famous presidents, to songs and tales of the soldiers that fought in the Mexican revolutionary war. This place is the best example of how sound can be used not just for music or art but as a way to preserve history and continue a cultural heritage.