Sing … Singe: joyful, melancholy, ashy
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We shimmer from one to the other, from a song to the ash heap.
GREGORY WHITEHEAD Whitehead’s radio art has long worked with the tension between eros and thanatos, life and death, light and dark. The sing/singe dyad is very close to his heart: it sings and singes. If not strictly autobiographical, The Respirator and other outcasts features “totenklage/lacrymosa” as a track among a half dozen. It draws in spirit from the artist’s own experience in a near-fatal car crash at age sixteen, suffering injuries which rearranged his subjectivity in ways that took a very long time to get sorted. Voices sing, singe and laugh through torturous burnings. [1987]
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