Sampling the City: Shiva Feshareki Live at the Sheldonian

Sampling the City is an interdisciplinary project between Shiva Feshareki and EMPRes that incorporates sound, electronic music composition, new technology, space, hermeneutics and architecture. The project will culminate in a unique spatial composition created live in-the-moment at the Sheldonian. A cutting-edge 16 speaker ambisonic sound-system will generate a new form of 3D spatial audio controlled by Shiva as she composes live, listening and responding to the acoustics, energy and architecture of the Sheldonian, aligning its history with the present composition.

Using her turntables, samples collected from in and around Oxford will be incorporated with music and archive recordings from the EMPRES library. Old college choirs LPs and soundwalks from around the city will be morphed, expanded and contracted into intangible objects of sound that move, swirl and glide in the space. Different voices will be heard and manipulated live in improvisation, speeding them up, slowing them down, forwards and backwards to infinite effect, creating music and new perspectives out of the diverse sounds and narratives of Oxford. This approach is archetypal of Shiva's ambisonic live turntablism in which she fearlessly warps time and space through the boundless possibility of her turntables, interconnecting society, geography, and history into musical compositions that broaden perspectives and free minds of restrictive social and sonic constructs.