Beginning with a photograph I hold dear of my grandparents proudly displaying bunches of home-grown grapefruit, I set out to make this image resonate through my obsessive expression of this personal icon. I wanted to turn the grapefruit into sound. While approaching the piece with a pictorial method, I hoped that my working process would be derailed and subverted by the unexpected worlds it would reveal. Somehow, through sound, I might find a way back to the people pictured in the photograph...at the very least (or most) I would go somewhere.

Grapefruit:I searched for texts using the words pulp, juice, juicy, grapefruit, squeeze, peel... Then I found and recorded people who seemed `right' for the scenarios and characters these texts evoked. I recorded the fruit themselves: cut into pieces, sucked, juiced and drunk. I listened to the recordings and found that the most interesting moments were when the tape recorder caught people off-guard in their attempts to assume the new identities the written texts suggested. Not only did these `found' words take me to a place apparently far from my family and the fruit, but my friends' voices and personalities tapped into stories and emotions I had not expected. I wanted to stage an intense physical interaction with the fruit itself. A cadenza for blender and 75 grapefruit was born and is now the fulcrum of the entire performance piece. During the first 10 minutes I chop feverishly as many fruit as possible into segments which the audience devour before I deal the final electric blow to the remaining fruit. In the end all that remains is to drink deeply and to sing.

Citrus is a performance piece for computer tape and live juicer/singer. The tape part was realized at the Winham Laboratory of Princeton University using NeXT computers and a combination of CARL Cmusic programs and Paul Lansky's Cmix. In concert the piece is performed with a food blender and microphone (processed by a 1970's foot-controlled flanger and a BOSS delay pedal), voice, 75 grapefruit, knife and 2 dissolve slide projectors. The slides were assembled by hand from multiple copies of two separate images enlarged and printed onto acetate.

Citrus premiered at Japan's SoundCulture Festival in 1993. The work received an honorable mention at the 1994 Prix Ars Electronica. In 1996 Citrus was featured at Brown University's American Music Festival.

photographs: Glad and Frank Boyce, Rosalie Palmer and grapefruit; Havelock North, New Zealand. Four generations: from my great-grandmother to myself; Nelson, New Zealand.
 

recorded voices: Josefina Calzada-Garza, Christoph Erlenkamp, Jeff Fourmaux, Juliet Palmer, Janet Parker, Peter Parker, Tom Parker, Chris Penrose, C. Bryan Rulon, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, Matt Wuolle, Mark Zaki.

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