FRAU LEHMANN is an interactive audio-visual composition and score for ice sculptures, inks, crayons, voice, biorhythmic data and movement. In the past, I’ve primarily focussed on the body as an entity to be explored in relation to abstract, subconscious and performed mechanisms such as dreams, acts of care and obsessive tendencies. 

FRAU LEHMANN is an attempt to displace and destabilise my body; to reimagine its role in online performance- as part of a vibrant intersecting assemblage of material and digital things. Traces of my previous embodied practices and artworks jostle and reform alongside fragments of family history and materials. These elements migrate and collide into their own melodrama of absence and abstraction. 

The Score was created by using biorhythmic sensors to generate data on muscle activity and heart rate which was cross-referenced against segments from two texts: My dream journal 2019-20, and my great Aunt Renate’s autobiographical account of her flight from Silesia in World War Two (Elisabeth’s Journey 1945: 2009, Hillside Publications) 

Frau Lehmann is a fleeting character in the book - a kind woman who provides temporary shelter.

Text pieces and data were combined in a layered score which was interpreted using materials and techniques used in my live work with the body (vocals, line-drawing, ice, inks, food colouring and electronics). A Max Msp patch was created which uses the amplitude of the composition to trigger biorhythmic data and digital effects. It creates a ‘data storm’ which floods my Twitter feed with indecipherable biorhythmic data when the piece is played. 

The piece features Robin Foster as Technical Director.

Lou Barnell is a London born composer, sound and movement artist whose work is characterised by intense electronic textures and visceral vocals, described as ‘angular, mesmeric and explosive’. As a neurodivergent female artist, Barnell is inspired by dissonance, using her body as a disorientated instrument and a navigational tool to compose and score. Barnell has developed ‘Live Dreaming’ as a method of examining the parallels between the subconscious mind and the act of performing, concluding that both are powerful meaning-making devices. These interests are interrogated by merging movement and vocals with sound and live sculptures by using shape-shifting re-useable materials.

Barnell’s compositional tools include melting ice, thermoplastic, and wearable sensors to create a world that sounds and looks like the lurid, alienating (and sometimes violent) memories she has as a young woman with a learning difficulty, growing up in London and Hastings.

Barnell performs and collaborates as LMB; a sound and movement collaboration with composer Lisa Busby and Breathing Space Collective. Her performances, exhibitions and commissions include; The Ashmolean Museum, Royal Academy of Arts (with Richard Wilson) Café Oto, Plesni Teater (Slovenia), Tate Modern, Performance Space ( Folkestone) Filskit Theatre and New Theatre Royal (Portsmouth) MUSLAB International Exhibition of Electroacoustic Music, (Mexico) Sonorities Festival (Belfast) International festival of Performing Arts (Oxford Brookes) The Freud Museum, Other Worlds festival, and the Bloomsbury Festival with Luke Jerram’s moon installation.

The FRAU LEHMANN scores can be purchased from the YARMONICS shop.

loubarnell.co.uk