The piece is 17’35’’ long and was mixed for an 8:1 surround diffusion. It comprises five parts:
Rosie Richardson
Anseriformes Circus: Ducks & Birds
Thomas Richardson
Drone Early Morning
Charles Richardson

The idea for this piece was to study sonically how particular twin brothers relate to each other and explore the potential of their voice timbre which seemed to constitute a powerful element for an acousmatic composition. Being twins, the two subjects first developed a “personal language”, a way of communicating with each other peculiar to them which no one else would understand. Therefore their ability to learn English was altered and they did not speak until they were almost four years old. “They both said the word Duck, and then they never learnt another word...’’

The piece is to be seen as a poetic construction using language and environment as its core. Although some kind of narrative may appear, the focus is on the schizophrenic nature of their dual discourses, timbres, and interactions in a sonorous way. The text is secondary to the sound exploration motivated by it. Language is used as sound and a trigger for other sounds to appear in context and to annihilate that very context at the same. The piece juggles with notions of paradox, time confusion, surrounding, sound dyslexia, duality and replica. The notion of play and childhood are also very important factors that informed the structure and sounds used in the piece.
The different textures are made up of field recordings around the city of Bath (UK), a duck pond, birds, houses, electrical equipments, circus were children were playing, as well as family archives found on location and recorded on tape.

Derrida speaks of the object of Phonography as the “conservation of the spoken language” and its characteristic is to “make it work outside the presence of the speaking subject.” The idea of the disembodied voice along with other disembodied environmental data is fundamental in my work. Nevertheless one could wonder if such a thing is possible for the human voice never really ceases to belong to its emitter, a certain body, a persona. The voice can only be partly disembodied; it always represents or at least is a manifestation of something exterior to itself. Instead, the disembodied voice could be seen as a deterritorialisation of speech. In A Thousand Plateau, Deleuze and Guattari assert that the first musical operation is “to machine the voice”, and that “words do not represent things so much as intervene in things, performing “incorporeal transformations” of bodies through speech-actions” (1987). In my practice I see the disembodied voice through the process of schizo-narrative as a “body without organs” which Deleuze describe as “a decentred body that has ceased to function as a coherently regulated organism, one that is sensed as an ecstatic, catatonic, (…) degree of intensity.” (Deleuze 1983) In other word the disembodied voice is not “extracted” or “separated” from the persona but is instead a deterritorialisation of the semantic persona. It is via this process of deterritorialisation of the phonographic voice and environment that my interviewees become what I call “sound-subjects”, bodies without organs. Voices become environments, environments become voices.