nour mobarak: dafne phono

Nour Mobarak's Dafne Phono is an adaptation of the first opera, Dafne, composed and written by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini in 1598. Drawing on the myth of Daphne and Apollo from Ovid's Metamorphoses -- a story of unrequited love, patriarchal possession, conquest, and transformation -- Mobarak's multimedia and multispecies reimagining splinters the opera's Italian libretto. Alongside English and Greek versions, it is translated into some of the world's most phonetically complex languages -- Abkhaz, San Juan Quiahije Eastern Chatino, Silbo Gomero, and !Xoon. In this process, the narrative -- and an artifact of Western culture -- is dismantled, metabolized, and rendered into unruly utterances that shape the sensorium as much as they do the capacity for sense-making. These voices are given material form by a cast of mycelium sonic sculptures whose rhizomatic compositions and broadcasted recordings resemble the formation and mutation of language over time, reconstituting speech into a new, polyphonic body politic, composed of voices whose striking, poetic utterances transfix and transcend meaning. The A-Side of the record presents a stereo version of Mobarak's 15-channel sound installation, Dafne Phono. The B-Side uses a recording of a portion of the translation process the libretto underwent in Namibia, live-processed by the artist. Dafne Phono is released in tandem with a book of the same name, published by Wendy's Subway.