The Judy Garland Project

Judy Garland, an ongoing interest in my work, used her voice to both shield and attack, its range and emotional scope oscillating between the quotidian and the operatic. The Judy Garland Project is a sound collage work incorporating over 100 of her songs, along with film dialogue, interviews, and personal home recordings. My hope in this project is to restructure Garland’s voice away from the gender narratives of her time period into a space of abstraction where voice can be heard outside the limitations of the original lyric. At times the focus of these tracks, as in Money, reflect topics of shared anxiety between Garland and myself, creating a fragmented overlapping autobiography of sorts. As Roland Barthes wrote in A Lover’s Discourse:

What constitutes the voice is what, within it, lacerates me by dint of having to die, as if it were at once and never could be anything but a memory. This phantom being of the voice is what is dying out, it is that sonorous texture which disintegrates and disappears.

The Judy Garland Project, 2014-2015
Duration: 00:16:11 minutes
Created in GarageBand, mastered in Logic