Katie Down

 

Biography

 

Katie Down is a sound artist, composer, performer and sound designer for theatre, film, video, and dance. She has performed in different ensembles including the Sephardic group Adelantre, the avant noise-improv group Liquid Ensemble, and is currently with the infamous ukulele group The Ukuladies! Katie has traveled extensively throughout Eastern Europe and the Balkans with different theatre artists as a performer, sound designer, and teacher in voice, improvisation, and clown and she plays several instruments including flute, Middle Eastern percussion, ukulele, guitar, didjeridu, and glass harmonica as well as a host of homemade instruments and found objects. She works regularly as a sound designer in New York and has created numerous sound scores and original music for Off, and off-Off Broadway productions for Target Margin, The Hourglass Group, Ripetime, New Georges, Ensemble Studio Theatre, SoHo Rep and others. Sound installations include: Homebase II (Broadway Gallery, 2007), And Suddenly….(Ohio Gallery, 2005), Vision Whisper (chashama Gallery, 2002). Katie is also deeply committed to the power of deep listening and sound healing and is currently working towards a Masters degree in music therapy at NYU.

 

 

Creative Process

 

The sound installation that was created for Homebase II at the Broadway Gallery in SoHo, New York, used both sound, music, and visual elements to create a world of memory and personal recounting juxtaposing stories of three different men whom I interviewed separately.

 

Each interview posed the same questions about their first childhood memories. The first man I recorded was a 35 year-old composer from Germany. The second was a 45 year-old Jewish man in publishing from New York and the third was a 52 year-old German-American cello player. Each had markedly different memories yet somehow there was a thread between all three stories that ties the imagery and essences of these memories together.

 

At the gallery, the space that was given to me was a storage space about 10 feet above the floor and directly above another artists’ work which was the façade of a vacant house comprised of black plastic rubber tubing. The storage space had French windows that opened outward. Inside the storage space were other multiple glass windows of varying sizes and degrees of quality, integrity and wear.

 

I used the discarded windows in a layered effect evoking how memories work when recounting events in our lives. The images unfold in bits and pieces, forming a whole picture out of fragments. Tiny audio speakers were placed inside the space so the sound was audible to those standing underneath the windows that opened on to the vacant house stucture. The windows were visible through the use of incandescent lighting that I sparsely placed in the attic space, so just like memory, the things that pop out are still somewhat obscured.

 

The audio portion was a linear sound collage using different sound-scapes, found sounds, and some original music as the underscore for the monologues. The whole piece took about 17 minutes to play out as each of the men recounted images from memories of their past.

 

 

 

 

Contact: www.katiedown.com, glassmusic@earthlink.net