We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Dancing With Toots Benedicta

by Lee Ingleton

supported by
Luke Farey
Luke Farey thumbnail
juju_azour
juju_azour thumbnail
helen50arc
helen50arc thumbnail
50arc
50arc thumbnail
syma
syma thumbnail
/

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.
    Purchasable with gift card

      name your price

     

1.
Alap 01:25
info
buy track
2.
Pick Up 11:33
info
buy track
3.
Channelling 33:26
info
buy track

about

'Dancing With Toots Benedicta' is a meditation on longing, belonging and dispossession, of love, loss and grief, that tunes into a slow dance across the Indian Ocean. Toots Benedicta, my grandmother, was born in what was then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, in the early 1900s, emigrating to Australia in 1950. Her story is a complex one, and our relationship was a distant one. I remember meeting her only a handful times before she died. These sounds are a love letter to her, an invocation to entwine our memories in a slow movement across time and space and spirit worlds.

'Alap', offers an introduction to a world of complex patterns and relations, summoning a memory yet to be formed, but which, as a compulsion to repeat, becomes a talisman, conjuring ghosts past, 'organising the muddled, barely remembered fragments of a lost past to find, to create an emotional place within it' (Dina Georgis, 'The Better Story', 2013).

'Pick Up' is a sounding 'archive of feelings', of transgenerational loss and unknowability. Pick Up is the Greek name for a record player, 'πικ απ', the stylus being the instrument that 'picks up' the sound. The gramophone was first introduced by Europeans to colonial Sri Lanka at the turn of the twentieth century. Recordings produced up to the 1950s for the Sri Lankan market offer a glimpse of the “Sri Lankan modern” through the “encounter with machines” (Wickramasinghe, 'Metalic Modern' 2014). Pick Up listens out for this encounter between Sri Lankans and their European colonisers, cutting and stitching fragments, traces, out-takes and mistakes for an alternative listening, 'slipping into the breaks' of this history and the crackle and static of the moments leading up to Ceylonese Independence in 1948.

'Channelling' is a transgenerational seance, communing with lost ancestors through the lower frequencies of Shruti Carnatic tunings. A meditation tuning into the unheard, searching for the missing notes, of difference and combination. A journey across water, a sublimated, sunken song, emerging momentarily from the depths.

credits

released February 14, 2022

Programming, composition and performance by Lee Ingleton
Mastered by Queer Ear Mastering
Supported using public funding by Arts Council England

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Lee Ingleton image

Lee Ingleton

Lee is a Sri Lankan-Australian artist and composer working in the fields of socially engaged arts and experimental electronic musics

contact / help

Contact Lee Ingleton

Streaming and
Download help

Report this album or account

If you like Lee Ingleton, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Featuring Riley Pinkerton (aka The Rat Queen) from the theatrical NYC rockers, Castle Rat.
listen now