Boing
– dull boing
– feeling out and repeating,
slowing into a rhythm more in
line with the steady heart. Beat.


Track Listing:
1 A Sorrow Keening 04:44
2 Elemental Argument 08:57
3 The Ecstasy of St Theresa 11:50

All tracks written and produced by Linda O’Keeffe

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These works are an exploration of the nature of spirituality and power, the use of the voice and narrative to tell a story and how the practice of relating to each other has changed with the metamorphosis of religion. Each work examines how the body plays a part in how the world is examined and understood.

The first piece is based on the practice of keening at funerals, a practice celebrated in numerous countries; it is both an expression of sorrow and an art form. The second work Elemental Argument is based on the stories of Aesop, Aesop’s fables were tales told to both children and adults to guide them in their behaviour. Aesop predominantly used animals and the elements as characters in his tales, giving them a voice and human characteristics.

The Ecstasy of St Theresa explores the influence sexuality has had on Christianity, as both a negative and positive power. This work was created while I was living in Chicago and was constantly coming across street evangelists whose overriding message was that sexuality was evil, the body was a vassal for God, yet there preaching was a form of Ecstasy a release of pent up emotion that bordered on the sexual.

Linda O’Keeffe
July 2010

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Stuff to occupy the mind – to fold between the membranes of the day’s events. The apparent stillness of the classroom moments after the final participants pass out the door – the strange alteration in times duration – lingering static hanging upon an atmosphere laced with ghosted words and exclamations. Seemingly there is no such a thing as Silence. Sounds, it turns out, do not evaporate, they do not ‘dis-appear’ so-to-speak, but they gradually dissipate their wavelengths, unraveling into the minutia of the cosmos, undulating exponentially towards a fractal universe altogether unfathomable. Absorbing into matter. Dirt behind the fingernails – more specifically clay – now mounted high, compacted, layer after layer – a small ecology listed there, imagined to be excavated by some tiny archaeologist, peeling away at the layers of preceding hours spent teaching… teaching – Concerns list themselves off the length of the arm. Most adamantly pricking at the brain though, the one that won’t whisht, the one that won’t be quieted, the one that wants to think…all the demands of that damned concern spell revolution regardless of the inconvenience. The archaeologists dig away, discovering ruptures – ‘Here there was some rupture in the status-quo’, they cry, ‘some discrete shift that changed the manner of following events’. Excited they carry on.

excerpt from  Resonant Ecologies…towards listening by Jessica Foley

The original version of this text appeared in Issue 130: Winter 2009 of Circa magazine.
Text reproduced with kind permission of Peter FitzGerald & Circa magazine.

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