Ashley Holmes: Decaying Tail of a Sound

Decaying Tail of a Sound is a live event by artist, Ashley Holmes as an outcome of his Jerwood Arts / FACT Fellowship. Centred on musical, theoretical and geographical explorations, Ashley will premiere a live version of a new sound composition developed from field recordings, conversations and materials gathered during his time spent in Liverpool.

The event title makes reference to a section of ‘Echo', a chapter by Julian Henriques and Hillegonda Rietveld from The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies - a volume presenting a comparative and historically informed understanding of the workings of sound in culture.

Ashley's interests focus on the sonic processes, iterations and influences of Dub, the sub-genre of reggae music, to examine Black music as a methodology to understand and re-define links between past and present within broader social contexts.

As part of his ongoing research he has broadcast radio shows and DJ mixes, produced audio compositions and worked with drawing and writing processes. Decaying Tail of a Sound continues this work and delves into the possibilities of sound, listening and movement as embodied practices.

The live event and research presented within his upcoming installation, bring together various visual and written materials that speak to the ways in which Black experimental sound facilitates encounters with geographical histories and Afro-diasporic philosophies that exist outside of prevailing, normative knowledge systems.

For this event, Ashley has invited artists Ratiba Ayadi and Seigfried Komidashi to share space and present live works that respond to themes of his research into echo, reverberation and notions of temporality and conceptions of place.

Ashley Holmes is an artist and DJ from Luton, currently based in Sheffield. His research is informed by an interest in the value and potential of music as a framework that allows us to think relationally within broader social, cultural, and political discourses and reimagine notions of listening, storytelling, collaboration, ownership, and belonging. Ashley currently hosts Tough Matter, a monthly broadcast on NTS Radio, and is a resident on Sheffield based online station Mondo Radio. He also facilitates Open Deck - a series of gatherings giving space to collectively listen and hold discursive space around relationships to music, sound, memory and oral histories. He is a lecturer in Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University.

Ratiba Ayadi is a composer, producer, sound and performance artist. She layer’s fragmented vocalisations over sonic landscapes and explores the possibility of curating invisible structures. She performs and records as an alias, Silent Songstress - an entity that can move through and between studies of self, through vocal and physical inquiry. She/they investigate the act of presence in absence and absence in presence. Birthed in the speculation of identity in the diaspora - sonically they exist together as a duplicity of being - a bridge between worlds. In collaborative works they tap into frequencies of alternate lifelines mirroring the suffocation of separation - because of oppression - and channel emotive melodies with otherworldly lyrics.

Seigfried Komidashi is an artist, musician, poet (a.k.a seigfried komidashi, sockless adventurer) from the Yoruba tribe, working with various mediums to engage in afrofuturist discourse on time, space and nostalgia in a neocolonial witt traditions of mystics and nomads past.

Host or Publisher FACT Liverpool