Manuella Blackburn

Interruptions gathers five stereo works that Manuella Blackburn composed between 2018 and 2023, mostly in her Manchester studio and at the studios of Keele University. All of them start from ordinary objects and domestic sounds, and several are built around the idea that gives the album its title: pauses, abrupt stops and held breaths, the interruptions of daily life treated as the main event rather than as accidents.

Home Truths, winner of the Marcelle Deschênes Prize at the 13th Musicworks contest, sets these interruptions in the home, and Cupboard Love uses the opening and closing of cupboards and drawers to frame brief sound memories of her past. Microplastics is made only from plastic: household waste, recordings at the Materials Recovery Facility in Sharston, where a raw recording of rubbish dumped onto a huge pile marks the middle of the piece, and tiny fragments from Tregantle Beach in Cornwall supplied by the artist Rob Arnold.

Farewell Fairlight uses only sounds of the Fairlight CMI: the factory samples shipped on 8-inch floppy disks for the Series II in 1982, including the bottle smash and ORCH 2, and the mechanics of the IIx at Keele, from the turn key and light-pen to its loud fan. Conversations with Peter Wielk filled in the backstory of the library, and the piece took a third prize at GRM Découvertes 2021. Landline, first prize at the 8th Musicworks contest, revisits the black rotary phone of her childhood home and the dial tones that differ from country to country.

Born in London in 1984, Blackburn studied at the University of Manchester, where she completed a PhD in electroacoustic composition with Ricardo Climent in 2010. She is Reader in Electronic Music and Sound Design at Keele University.

CD-R edition in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 24194, 2024.