Nicola Woodham: Parenthesis
Navel-Gazers #65 is an interview with Nicola Woodham who is going to talk to us about Parenthesis. Lurking around music events in London one encounters countless performers who have some sort of presence on Bandcamp or Soundcloud - it’s not always easy to navigate through everything being released and locate the special gems. For some reason when ‘Parenthesis’ was released, it instantly caught my attention. Despite Nicola being a prolific artist with an affinity for all different formats - she performs, she produces tangible media of various kinds, she even invents new technology for artists - I’d never come across any full length albums. ‘Parenthesis’ radiates with a sense of purpose and determination. Its sole sound source is the human voice, and I like the way that those voices - along with that title, explicitly - send me scrambling for context in tried-and-true Navel-Gazers fashion. There are supplementary materials which are integral to the work, starting with the typographic visuals on the cover, ultimately leading me to a booklet that comes with the physical release describing Nicola’s intentions with the project. But I’ve got more questions! Thankfully Nicola is my neighbour so we’re having our discussion at a local coffee shop. Let’s fill in the blanks.
AC: Thanks for joining me on Navel-Gazers! First could you tell us about your background?
AC: As a multi-media artist, you present work in all different ways, from performances to compositions to inventions. When do you choose to produce and release an album? What’s that medium for?
Nicola Woodham: It’s tricky because I was aware that I was doing a lot of live music performances and making videos of them, but not releasing the pieces. I questioned where the artefact was, and that’s how this whole project became about. I’ve been very censorious of my music work in the past and not content with work enough to release or develop it. What happens is that this archive just amasses and amasses - suddenly I thought that this stuff that happens in rehearsal is interesting, and it’s a shame to keep it under wraps.
I had a performance that I was preparing, for the National Poetry Library event on Sounding & Reading that was curated by Iris Colomb, and I was doing my usual in the rehearsal studio preparing for that, working out what the set would be. And there was a lot happening there in terms of long improvisation sessions that can’t - or I haven’t allowed to - happen live. They’d run for about an hour, and from that I’d make selections. So these sessions start to become recordings that I’ve made in order to prepare for the live event.
But I then thought that there are sections of these that I can release in and of themselves. I don’t mind that they don’t have specific beginnings or endings, where it’s unfinished or a rehearsal, with this “run-up” kind of vibe to it.
Nicola Woodham: That’s it, right. There’s a lot of activity that gets squirrelled away and archived, so this is saying we can care for these parts of the process.
AC: There’s a helpful essay in the sleeve notes accompanying ‘Parenthesis’. In it, you seem to describe vocal performance as something disruptive, likening it to a parenthetical construction. Could you elaborate on that and on how the poem from Women In Concrete Poetry by Françoise Mairey with its parentheses inspired this project?
Nicola Woodham: I want to draw on an important reference here which is of course Laurie Anderson. When you’re working with processed voice, and also as a female performer, it’s important to recognise her work. When I started with processed voice and looking at some writings and interviews with her, I was drawn to this line about what she suggests is a breach between the body - the external appearance of the performer - and the sorts of sounds she is making or producing.
She wanted to move away from the idea of the female nurturing voice, that it’s going to be a singing voice, or something that’s going to create empathy, or appease, or make one feel comforted, especially when that expectation marries up with the physical exterior.
So what I like to create, she calls them “audio masks” but I started to call them “vocal others” or “sonic allies”, because through these fictional voices I was able to say things I was struggling to say in my daily experience.
I’m interested in the idea that when I create a voice that doesn’t sound like mine or can suggest another character, that these other versions of myself, they’re almost like a gang.
AC: A gang?
Nicola Woodham: Yeah like a vocal gang, power in numbers, advocates.
AC: Right yeah. That is what this sounds like!
Nicola Woodham: Ah! What makes you think that?
AC: It sounds like what you said. A group of characters, sort of egging each other on.
Nicola Woodham: Oh yeah. Cool!
So then with the treated voice, also when I use things like volume and reverberation, filling up the space of shouting hecklers in the audience for example - which is in my usual experience! - it really works in a lot of noise scenarios… it’s good to meet that lack of attention, or drift of attention. As a female performer especially, it’s good to play around with that.
The concrete poem by Françoise Mairey that’s using curved brackets, she’s sort of saying: let’s take this grammatical form of a parenthesis, what does it do? It makes something stand out, or it can marginalise, or suggest an exception. Once you split that, and use them in a pattern-like way and create gaps, I think it just cracked that all open for me.
AC: Right there’s also the gaps. If you were to try and type that poem you’d use three characters: the two curved brackets and the space.
But I thought of the gaps as almost like a redaction as well. It brought up a lot for me, womens’ vocal performance not getting the platform or the pay. It’s still a male-dominated arena I think, I hate to say it because I don’t like to enforce that kind of separatism but it made me think about who’s invisible, who gets put forward, who gets censored.
The spaces though, create visual pathways, there’s a dual nature to that gap. There’s that sense of a redaction, but there’s also a path.
AC: They’re adjacent right, the spaces…? in that poem you can go down to the next row from one space to the other.
Nicola Woodham: Yeah so if you are standing far enough away there are these big gaps at the centre. They’re sort of snake-like gaps.
AC: Yes. You also talk about your vocal improvisation sessions at Gun Factory Studios which formed part of the process here. I’m interested to hear more about that, how does that material develop in the studio and what’s your thought process during it?
Nicola Woodham: I was once asked how I start producing ideas, and it was great to be asked the question: do ideas come through experimentation? No one had ever given me the opportunity to respond in that way, and it was such a life-changing question.
AC: Who asked you that?
Fortunately it’s not a hugely expensive place and I’ve got the time to do it, which feels like a luxurious way of working as I recognise the constraints that others can face with that. It’s important for me to just bring everything - you’ll often see me hauling a huge trolley around, this massive 80 liner trolley. I’ve got my sketchbooks, I’ve got pedals, if I’m working with my digital instruments I’ve got them.
When I get to the studio, everything comes out, I’ve got my little warmup and then I improvise and record. I use the Kaoss pad to do the effects processing, I’ve also got a guitar pedal I use, I don’t use the Mac much at the moment but in the past have used cut-up and randomising effects on the Mac, to throw the vocals around and allow them to speak back.
Also massively referencing dear old strange William Burroughs, allowing that spell-like quality of the recorded sounds to reflect back, or create some kind of spark that can be built on and used… and act as a hex! Haha.
AC: Ha! So you allow yourself pretty liberal use of tools and materials at a session like this, but you don’t come armed with an idea, is that right?
Nicola Woodham: Well I knew that I wanted to bring in the Françoise Mairey poem. In the long improvisations I start using particular words and phrases, and in terms of working towards a live performance I’ll jot down phrases that I either want to repeat or use them as prompts for improvisation, and then I end up with a visual score. I work with colour felted pens and use colour coding to suggest ways I’m going to deliver the different elements. The score is always part of the distillation of this process.
Nicola Woodham: Yes that’s right.
AC: So then the performance is all the way at the end and these types of recordings are an artefact from earlier in the process.
Nicola Woodham: That’s it, exactly.
…and I have so many files of the same status. Those moments might have come and gone in the past and I just didn’t have the ears for them and was being too censorious of myself, or it may be that I’ve just got better! So I was just listening back one day and thought: I’m going to hand it over to my technician, who’s going to edit these very lightly and we’re going to get them out.
…and the technician is still me, but in my head I have to say that I’m handing it over to a technician!
AC: Oh! Aha, ok, I see.
Nicola Woodham: It’s just a game I play with myself. To not have that thing where you say: I’m so sick of these, they’re so annoying, no one’s going to listen to them. I think working DIY as a solo artist, as a byproduct of working over and over on things by yourself, it’s just so difficult to keep the interest and the momentum. That’s why it’s good to hand over to a producer.
AC: So to speak.
There’s a symmetry to the titles on this album in terms of the placement of the parentheses. We’ve got the opening bracket found in track 2 (All Around and the closing bracket in track 4 all around). Where did that idea come from? Does it relate to the sounds?
Nicola Woodham: ‘All Around’ is a name I gave to one very long improvisation, I think it develops over an hour, and the track in the middle, Parenthesis, is maybe the most lucid track on the album, there’s a lot of unprocessed voice on that one.
AC: Yes, a lot of solo voice there, with no layering.
Nicola Woodham: That’s it, yes, so it’s very different. And the “all around”, because I was using this phrase “all around” and layering that and muffling it to get a sense of claustrophobia, being surrounded and submerged within - I think sludgy murk is how I referred to it in the sleeve notes - I was trying to create a sound that was cacophonous and a sense of not being able to escape. That was also to do with a lot of images in my mind at the time.
It’s quite hard to explain this actually. This is what I found with the whole album, I got into these sort of… conceptual complexities. …what did you think?
AC: I think especially now that I see it on the physical release, it reads almost like a distillation of parentheses, as a device. They’re surrounded by un-parenthesised text as well here, just like in a sentence.
Nicola Woodham: Ah yes! Thanks. Yes and it refers to the form and the sounds as well. It’s a concrete poem which came out of the selection of the tracks, and the selection points back to the concepts that drove the tracks. So there’s this looping of ideas. This is often how things work for me, there comes to be this mirroring in terms of the form and the ideas and the sounds, I enjoy that kind of patterning.
AC: We often get into the topic of symmetry and asymmetry in these discussions on Navel-Gazers. Yours is a very considered symmetry on this album, you seem acutely aware of the form of what you’re doing and I think people aren’t always, when they make an album.
Please tell us about the ‘Parenthesis’ visuals, including the cover image which was created in 1997. How did you come to choose that for this release, and how did the other images come about?
Nicola Woodham: The album size is pretty much the same size as the book that this image comes from. Like many artists, I made a lot of works in sketchbooks, this one comes from my foundation sketchbooks.
I just really like this kind of artefact too, a piece which exists in a sketchbook, and the practice in foundation of making the biggest sketchbook that you could, and packing so much in that it wasn’t a sketchbook anymore, it was just this ridiculous thing that you couldn’t close. Everyone had this competition I think, how ridiculous can you make your sketchbook? where the backs of the pages would just bend back around, this constantly open thing.
No one ever says says to me that they hated their fine art foundation. It was the perfect time, where there was this big generosity, and a sense that everything counts. And I think that was it. When I was going through my old sketchbooks, this image was there and I thought this relates so much to what I’m doing at the moment. But it wasn’t chosen after the tracks were chosen, everything was happening at the same time.
It’s got an element of concrete poetry to it, and it’s still got the feeling of a sketch.
AC: I guess in terms of everything we just talked about, the sketch is just like that as well, tucked away in a sketchbook but actually quite valuable. It’s a snapshot of somewhere along the journey, and there’s an excitement or a movement to it, just like those recordings.
Nicola Woodham: Yes! And like you said in the beginning, why release it? It’s looking back at artwork and thinking there’s something really great about a piece of work that hasn’t been developed, in some way, not exactly unfinished but sitting in this sort of liminal space. So if you bring those elements of liminality to create a finished piece, hopefully some of that energy - for want of a better word - or say potential, is maintained.
Maybe it’s also just a bit of kick in the teeth to the idea that everything has to be driven to perfection and standardisation, and an idea that there isn’t “old” work, there’s just work that you do. If you want to use an image from a sketchbook from when you were a child, why not, it’s all work!
Nicola Woodham: Yeah and maybe in a way, I’ve always had confidence in the work, but not in its status.
AC: Yes I see.
Nicola Woodham: And that it seems as though the work is still “alive”. Because one of the things about the process of finishing something that I often find so draining and unsatisfying is this way that it sort of seems to be the death knell of the work. It almost becomes your greatest hits or something, you know, as though it’s all downhill from here. You’re just trying to keep it alive in some way.
But also just having that confidence to be visible and put something out there, that’s not always been forthcoming to me, certainly something that I’m pushing on right now.
AC: It doesn’t appear to relate to this album specifically, but could you briefly tell us about your e-textile wearable performance device? You and I had such an interesting discussion about that back in January.
Nicola Woodham: Well at this stage of the devising I hadn’t brought in the sounds from the wearable digital instrument that I used in the final performance. They did feature in the performance at the National Poetry Library but they’re not featured on here, and that’s something I’d like to change for future recordings.
The new instrument that I’ve made is more in keeping with the concepts that I’ve talked about. The instrument is like a wearable audio vocal processor and live sampler, still very simple with its playback capacity, but it does mean that I can move around and sample my voice and process it via a wearable costume.
I’ve been using e-textiles to make sensors, and they’re great because they can be embedded into fabric which means you can invent that into a costume, and it all means that the sound-making interface is very comfortable, flexible, and the sounds can be triggered by specific movements rather than our usual sense of how a sampler is controlled through manipulation using hands, generally.
So in the performance I used the pre-device to this. There are two pieces of work, one’s called the Buffer and the other is called Buffer Live.
AC: Right I saw this on your website. So in the performance you used Buffer.
Nicola Woodham: That’s right.
AC: What’s next for you? Any new projects on the horizon?
Nicola Woodham: That one didn’t at the time. I generally do name them, in response to the place, the audience, and some elements that would have come up in rehearsal before it.
AC: I’m taking note of this! Ok and also, you have your score with the drawings. I saw that, come to think of it.
Nicola Woodham: Yeah! I’ve got loads of those. I’m planning to do a book of them.
AC: Cool. So you were saying you are going to do something with that recording?
Nicola Woodham: Well, it’s unusual for me to go back to a piece and record it, I’d usually think of releasing the live version. I’m going to listen to the live version but I like the challenge of keeping as close to it as I can, although some elements were improvisation, so I’m not going to verbatim re-improvise.
AC: Yeah that doesn’t feel right.
Nicola Woodham: No, haha. But I’ll do different versions, I expect, and the aim is to make a recording that can be released and also work with some ideas that will be generated in those sessions, and make some sister pieces, and release that as an album.
AC: What a great idea. I like that you’re not just going to release a recording of the set, and yet having done the set is probably integral to what you’re going to do, having responded to the space, etc.
Nicola Woodham: Yes. …a great night.
AC: A great night. First solo set I’ve seen from you.
Nicola Woodham: The reason it was better - I thought - than in the past, is that Spanners are just so amazingly hospitable, as were Daryl and Iris, all those things really count I think.
AC: That’s DIY right? Because everything’s small, everything’s personal.
Nicola Woodham: That’s true.
AC: Any parting comments for us?
Nicola Woodham: Well! Let’s leave it open.
AC: Like we just talked about right?
Nicola Woodham: Exactly.
AC: Thanks for talking to me.
Nicola Woodham: Thank you, it was very enjoyable!
Images
All images by Nicola Woodham and/or AC except where credited.
0) 'Parenthesis' cover image.
1) Nicola.
2) Gear at the studio.
3) 'Parenthesis' cover image and CD.
4) Performance at Skronk, Endeavour, 2025. (image by Nathan Greywater).
5) 'Parenthesis' sleeve.
6) Gear at the studio.
7) Score from the 'Buzz" launch at Spanners, 2025.
8) 'Parenthesis' sleeve.
9) Gear at the studio.
10) 'Parenthesis' track listing on the back cover.
11) Performance at Dronica #6, The Old Church, 2017. (image by Matteo Favero).
12) 'Parenthesis' sleeve.
13) Performance at Cafe Oto, 2021. (image by Matteo Favero).
14) 'Parenthesis' sleeve/spine.
15) Nicola and AC at The Old Church.
