Hextape | Phoenix Central Park 2022

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Bridget Chappell (aka Hextape) is an artist trying to contextualise a lot of trespass and nostalgia through raves, dance music, custom sound systems, pirate radio stations, poetry, contemporary and classical cello, doom metal, podcasts, and essays. Their albums 2 Fast 2 Furious (Anterograde, 2019) and Undertow (Heavy Machinery Records, 2020) received critical acclaim.

Chappell is an artist larping as a scientist; data sonification, 3D sound modelling, live coding, siren phase cancellation, etc. Chappell is the founder of the award-winning Sound School (Narrm/Melbourne), current co-director of artist-run initiative Watch This Space (Mparntwe/Alice Springs), and tries to leave a trail of rave breadcrumbs wherever they go.

For her performance at Phoenix Central Park, Chappell will premiere a new work for cello, synthesizer, and field recordings exploring the musicality of MRI scanners. The composition, based on experiences of MRIs as both a patient and researcher, seeks to convey the complicated emotions and rave-for-one magic of these machines, whose magnetic 'music' usually comes only to us as a siren song in hospital. The machine's sounds cannot be recorded, so Chappell has treated it as a work to be learned from memory, and the machine a musical collaborator.