The Thicket
“It’s not like much else I’ve heard… it’s really knocked me sideways, in a good way.”
Jen Allen, BBC Radio 3, Late Junction
“A meditation on humans & our place on Earth, conjuring both a sense of home & another world… Clarke reminds us that the barriers between real & imagined, natural & inorganic, aren’t so strict.”
Vanessa Ague, The Quietus
A strange new a capella work from Bristol-based sound artist Yas Clarke, The Thicket is an intricate, rhythmic and melodic text score, composed for four voices. Sometimes narrative, sometimes abstract & non-verbal – this text is an arcane expression of the human relationship with its environment.
Each singer is conducted by a distinct in-ear score, a process which allows for detailed structuring of the four-part score; phrases, words and syllables layered into elaborate rhythms and harmonies otherwise impossible to perform. The result is mesmerising & uncanny, an experience which transports & transfixes.
Yas Clarke is a sound artist and composer experimenting with form and process within live and recorded sound. His work explores the human relationship to its environment, probing the boundaries between organic and synthetic; human and natural; continuous and discrete. He is best known for his work in live-art and experimental theatre, working with artists such as Nic Green, Cade and MacAskill, Action Hero and Deborah Pearson.
