LMB

Collaboration with Lou Barnell. Bodily and sonic improvisation work. Fragment scores and floating lists. Project in development.

LMB is an ongoing collaborative project and space of shared making for Lou Barnell and Lisa Busby - to consider relationships of body, voice and sound in composition, improvisation and performance. Their work together begins from the starting principle of listening as a whole-body phenomenon; and sounding, singing and moving as ways of hearing. LMB works through negotiations, tracings and intimacies between bodies; repetition as revisitation; and embodiments of intangibles, lists and empty work tasks - all as tools to orientate and negotiate meaning in the moment of performance itself. Their process often involves generating, abstracting, then reconstituting vocal and movement material in dreamlike collages of fragments.

Their debut collaborative public work (2019) comprised two iterations of 'Skin Meditations', a framework that used two short written texts, a series of viscous liquids and other explorable objects and materials, and a bounded set of coordinates (from a large roll of paper to a field in the Oxfordshire countryside) as semi-score for live composition. Inspired by reflections on touch and the haptic, in relation to personal and familial experience of skin conditions; the work thought about the tactile experience of the outer edges of the body, everyday care and micro moments of self-destruction.

Following these thematic threads around care and destruction, Lou and Lisa developed ‘The Shining Rock’ (2020) - a performance and original text and graphic score exploring desire and exhaustion. For choreographed and improvised movement, field recordings, lapsteel, electronics and voice, the performed score utilises fragments of Sappho's poems as core materials, alongside original creative writing. These texts are sung, uttered, and otherwise “voiced” in a responsive, semi-improvised methodology, exploring a landscape that sits between the melodic and the spoken.

later the same year, in the midst of lockdown, they created 'With you, I am in that place' for curators Slant Events. This video performance reflects on a 2018 site specific improvisation - the gulf between this early process work, its focus on the tactile experience of the performers' entangled bodies; and by contrast the restricted performance landscape of 2020, distanced intimacy and care.

Lisa and Lou also work together in Lou Barnell’s evolving project MELTA - a durational performance using alchemical sound-material sculptures and wearables (including ice, reusable thermoplastic, and biorhythmic sensors); using 'live dreaming' as a method of exploring multidimensional orientation, listening and embodied sound.