Solemn and seductive music for multiple synthesisers, live and recorded concrète sounds, physical theatre and projected concrete poetry about people needing a safe place to call home. Serious and thought-provoking yet ultimately uplifting, the performance combines rich visual imagery with familiar domestic soundscapes.

Composer-performer Seán Clancy sits and the floor, playing bittersweet tones on a synthesiser. A pile of brightly coloured plastic rods and balls surrounds him. Fragmented text appears on the walls behind him, declaiming slogans about the necessity of finding safety and a sense of belonging. Performance artist Andy Ingamells improvises abstract music on a trowel with a microphone creating granular percussive sounds as a counterpoint to Seán’s rising melodies. He then gathers the rods and balls and uses them to construct a shelter around Seán. Domestic soundscapes complete the performance as Seán is cocooned in his shelter.

In the second half Seán and Andy perform a 30-minute piece on two tables based on an image by photographer Antonio Guillem. Guillem is responsible for creating a stock image that went on to be used in ‘the distracted boyfriend meme’, appearing on the Internet in 2017. The meme became a springboard for this piece, provoking a fragmented text improvised by the two performers on Twitter over the course of 28 days. The collected text became a score of choreographed actions for paper marionettes, a child’s set of maracas, musical typing, copying and pasting, a synthesiser, and performed speech.

Seán Clancy and Andy Ingamells are a performance duo that explore collaborative processes through a kind of visual musique concrète arising from the images of performance situations. Their work has been performed throughout Ireland and the UK, and broadcast on BBC Radio 3.