The Rapture of Cellular Accretion | Lucy Duncombe

Explore the piece: music, text & artwork

Market is excited to present The Rapture of Cellular Accretion, a new commission by Glasgow-based musician and artist Lucy Duncombe. Initially planned as a performance in March 2020, the work was reconceived as a tape, fiction text and artwork during the convalescence of lockdown.

The Rapture of Cellular Accretion concerns the back and forth sharing of music within the alternate sociality of digital space; lives held within YouTube playlists and cultivated within an ample hamlet of thumbnails, comments, and auto suggestion, with a sense of a ‘we’ stuck recursively in loops of musical fable. With melodic references to songs hosted within the imagined YouTube playlist of The Rapture or comments left on its videos, its musical world is contained and atomic.

Almost all of the pieces here use the ensemble of the voice for its instrumentation; stretched, pitch shifted, cut and repeated to create a ‘texture of one’, with Ailie Ormston providing non-vocal instrumentation on several of the tracks. The text of The Rapture of Cellular Accretion is embedded within a febrile code world conceived and designed by artist Al White.

Market is pleased to invite you to a digital event on Sunday February 28th, where the text will be launched at 7.30pm as a pdf, and the audio piece will be broadcasted from the website at 8pm. The Rapture of Cellular Accretion will be available to explore from the Market website after the launch, and a physical version of the piece can be purchased as a limited edition package of artwork, text and tape here.

Credits:

Music: Lucy Duncombe

Text: Lucy Duncombe

Instrumentation on Several Tracks: Ailie Ormston

Artwork: Al White

Lucy Duncombe is a Glasgow-based musician and artist, interested in the ways in which transposition of the voice and language onto machinic technologies can disrupt or alter its relationship to the body, dispersing the voice across multiple temporalities, objects and simulated spaces.

Duncombe’s previous works include And If I Was A Word Could My Letters Number A Hundred, More Likely Coarse and Guttural, One Syllable Anglo Saxon (David Dale Gallery, 2019), The Yips (Celine Gallery, 2018), Pop Ago, (Counterflows Festival, Tramway, 2018), Labyrinthine, (The National Opera of Belgium, 2015, and BBC ‘Here and Now’ Tectonics Festival, 2016), a chamber opera co-composed with video artist and performer Anneke Kampman and Jane Dickson.

Image credits: Al White