Jennifer Walshe

NCH Kevin Barry Room, Dublin:What can you say about Jennifer Walshe? The word "boundary" does not seem to be part of her vocabulary. She composes, she performs and she improvises, singing and vocalising to her own accompaniments on a range of instruments, sometimes with electronic processing to boot. She blurs distinctions between composition, performance art and sound poetry, as well as those between fact and fiction.

When she was commissioned by South Dublin County Council’s INContext 3 Per Cent for Art programme, she studied and documented the work of the little-known sound-art collective, Grúpat. She’s performed their work in Ireland and abroad, and curated a showcase at Dublin’s Project Arts Centre earlier this year, which resulted in a book and a set of CDs.

But Ukeoirn O’Connor, Turf Boon, Detleva Verena and The Dowager Marchylove – whose work she performed at this NCH concert – are all, as are the other members of the group, Jennifer Walshe herself. The detailed biographies (and the press clippings from the book) are all just well fleshed-out figments of her imagination.

Her various personas seem to give her the kind of freedom traditionally associated with masked balls. She’s a composer who likes to let it all hang out.

The Softest Music in the World

, by Turf Boon (who, she insists, is a freegan), is a video without soundtrack, with simultaneous images of things such as marshmallow drums played with cotton buds, a teddy bear blowing into a tiny plastic trumpet, or a soft-toy dog being hit by a hammer, the duration apparently governed by the time it takes a melting chocolate bunny to collapse.

Walshe and her alter egos like writing for voice in ways that are unpredictable, sometimes as oddly intimate as the sounds that babies make or as shocking as the struggles of death by choking. Walshe is a shape-shifter when it comes to styles, with vocal deliveries that range from operatic to oriental, from traditional and pop music to the purely phonetic.

The effects range from the silly and giddy to the disturbingly dark. And the timing and transitions are provocative, too. Excess becomes a tool for transformation, and jump-cuts occur when you least expect them.

It’s the kind of endeavour that could all too easily fall flat on its face. But as she showed in the concluding concert of the New Sound Worlds series, Walshe is a performer to the bone, absorbing and engaging, even if she can at times seem like a child living out her wildest fantasies with her toys.