Keir Cooper & Eleanor Westbrook - Star Quality - Speculations For Guitar And Voice (2024)

Star Quality is an attempt to harness the power of Soprano voice and all the grandeur of opera and set this in conversation with electric guitar. The compositions use various applications of crude technology (digitally-generated voice, autotune, microsampling, reverb levels etc), to push this duet to extreme sonic places, finding aesthetic and emotional resonance in a language of its own.

The guitar takes a principal role, a distinctive combination of the beautiful and the impossible. Constructed through performance, note-by-note assemblage and detailed editing, the ‘guitar-ness’ is recognisable yet unique, switching between familiarity and innovation. Alongside this, the soprano’s vocal performance is presented in dialogue with an existing culture of limitless sonic manipulation.

Each piece on Star Quality offers a different perspective on the capabilities of guitar and voice, making them rub and contradict and fuse and blend in response to our accelerating times.

After the opening piece, a revision of an English traditional song, the album contains no words.