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Thoughts and Processes II

Daydream and Drunkenness

April 2019

I was given a collection of Clarice Lispector short stories in 2018 as a birthday present, and Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady immediately stood out to me. It had a very sonic feel to it: I could hear sounds—not words—as I was reading each page. And so I made my own interpretation of it, a non-verbal, non-literal imagining of the daydreams and drunkenness of a young lady.

By adapting Lispector’s work in this way, I wanted to create a soundscape that felt natural and not overly processed. My main inspiration was Clarice Lispector’s writing. Previously, I had read Hour of the Star and, like in Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady, found her use of language and orthography utterly fascinating. A non-verbal soundscape felt like a natural extension of her words.

I knew that I wanted it to be quite an intimate piece, and I find it difficult to create work that has a natural texture with sounds from a sound library, for example. Therefore, that aesthetic necessitated using my own field recordings, let’s say, and I was able to that for the entire piece, although there was one sound that I had to delve into a library for.

One of the hardest challenges in realising this work was how to tell the story. Without words, text, what makes a story? In figuring how to tell the story I focused on the passage of time, the physical space the story inhabits, and the emotional state of the eponymous young lady. A decision I faced early on was whether to recreate 1960s Brazil, Rio de Janeiro—the time and place of the original story—or not. That would have been an enormous challenge in the time I had to complete the project and so instead of a period piece, I feel as though the soundscape is suspended in a timeless, ageless, and wordless world, almost a dreamlike state.

My intention wasn’t to create a complete and definitive story, but to construct a narrative in the story world create makes the story itself more credible. I’m interested in what people think of it whether they’ve read the story or not because I feel that all responses are equally valid. I think anyone can relate to this piece, although there might be a bit more for those with prior exposure to Lispector’s work, and in particular Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady, to experience. Nevertheless, I’m curious whether common themes emerge among the two camps of those who know the short story, and those who don’t.

Daydream and Drunkenness is the first time I’ve mixed binaurally, and my personal experience was that the results you get have a lot to do with intention. I didn’t find myself ‘thinking binaurally’, I think because, really, the process was an extension of my intention. There was no special hat to put on; it was simply the process of trying to realise the work in the way that best represents it.

Daydream and Drunkenness of a Young Lady is published by Penguin Modern.

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