MEDIATHEK

Invisible Music began life when Cath Church, Artistic Director of Platform 4, accompanied her mother on a visit to her weekly lip-reading class. She began to attend regularly, and later started to interview them. With some seed money from Winchester Hat Fair, she began work on the piece that would become Invisible Music in the summer of 2016.
 
 The voices of the interviewees arise from the centre of the space, triggered electronically by the musicians. A radio in the centre occasionally crackles into life to deliver fragments of a poem by Jan Church, Cath's mother. The five person band mostly face inwards, playing a range of instruments arranged in a loose circle in an approximation of a recording session. They are a constant presence, mediating the audience’s experience of the worlds of our interviewees - sometimes acting as a bridge, sometimes as a barrier.  
 
 The loose narrative of the piece centres around the idea of a tropical island with its beauty and isolation, setting sail to search for something, then drifting and sinking into underwater distortions and darker emotions, which then gives way to a gradual recovery and the dawning of acceptance at the end.
 
 The final element in the mix is the projected artwork, by Barrett Hodgson, consisting largely of fragments of the text spoken by our participants. Invisible Music is a simple piece using the interplay of spoken word, music and projections to portray the world of hearing loss - one that most of us find unimaginable.