Dystopia // Current

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Why the Golden Gate is the Sci-fi director's favourite target

Because unlike the Statue of Liberty, it's a genuine American construct, built during the Great Depression and therefore... more

Mr_Costello
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"The story is this: in a very distant, watery future, one lonely creature survives — Blorkra, the clumsy result of evolution backtracking from the human form to allow for a largely aquatic world. This dismal creature spends her days watching the beach, haunted by visions of her human predecessors.

“It’s not that different from singing operatically on land,” claims Snapper, who has previously worked with the extreme performance artist Ron Athey on The Judas Cradle, in which she sang hanging upside down until her voice collapsed. “It uses the same basic process of compressing the air, creating a stream of soundwaves and allowing that to go into the water, with a little bit more care because at the end of the phrase you don’t want to pull any water in.” And how do you not do that? “You monkey with your throat a little bit. Underwater you really want to be able to shut that door.”

The pressure changes are the worst, “especially within the first 30ft or so. The oxygen in your lungs has compressed, so you can be down at the bottom and taking in air, but if I don’t sing on the way up with a lungful of air, then the lungs will burst because as the air decompresses, it gets bigger, so it will pop the balloon.”

In this case, fortunately, the pool is only about 6ft deep, but Snapper intends to take her technique to the sea in the future. She describes the process of working out how to do it as “trial and error”. “If you get a couple of tablespoons of water in your lungs, they stop functioning. I had some scary moments, getting tangled up in the sets and not being able to surface, or just being a goof and running out of air in my oxygen tank on the bottom.” She now practises with people on hand to help her out of difficulty. “It’s completely negotiable as long as you don’t panic,” she says, blithely.

It’s impossible to imagine what it will sound like. Sound behaves quite differently in water than in air — Snapper describes the “airless” sound of a voice filtered through water as “like a humming and mewling”. The bubbles she produces have their own character. “The vocal melody is complicated by the percussive sound of the bubbles. If the bubbles are smaller or larger, then the percussive sounds will come more or less rapidly and they all have pitches attached to them. Sometimes you have a kind of second melody over the voice.” But does it sound like singing? “It does. I think it sounds like singing.” But you wouldn’t know, because you’re under the water, doing it. “Now I’m wondering!”""The story is this: in a very distant, watery future, one lonely creature survives — Blorkra, the clumsy result of... more