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  Sabisha Friedberg. Courtesy of Eduard Plongeon.
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Sabisha Friedberg: The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere

For her Spring 2011 Audio Art Residency at the Clocktower Gallery, audio artist and composer Sabisha Friedberg created The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere, a radio adaptation of the 19th century Hermetic tale Etidorhpa, or, the end of the earth: the strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey. Published in 1895, Etidorhpa tells the tale of an unknown man’s journey to the center of the earth, divulging arcane secrets in a process of initiation, and revealing a journey to an ethereal plane of non-material existence. Friedberg’s The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere is a sonic prose-poem for the radio, drawing on the fantastical Victorian novel’s text and spiritual and scientific explorations as an inspiration for original soundscapes. Friedberg is known for investigating the tactile and aleatory qualities of analog material and antiquated technologies. For this project, she combined an electro-acoustic approach with an application of granular synthesis to create specific auditive forms, adapting the 19th century Hermetic tale into an aural soundscape, illustrating the chapters with dialogue and musical interludes, and creating the environment of the piece with textures and effects generated by vintage foley work. ---- Born in Johannesburg South Africa, Sabisha Friedberg studied Fine Arts and completed her degree in Sound and Installation in the New Genres Department of The San Francisco Art Institute. There she studied experimental film with Ernie Gehr and recording and electro-acoustic/ tape music composition with Don Llloyd, Paul de Marinas and Chris Brown of Mills College of Contemporary Music. Aside from her solo project entitled The Torch Press, she records and performs in Sol Del Moon and the Paris-based band Lustrine. She recently was awarded a prize at the Bourges International Electro-Acoustic Music Competition in France for her musique concrète piece Ellipsis. Commissioned by the Villa Noailles in Hyères, this series of sound pieces will be part of the permanent exhibition. For this she was invited to perform a live electro-acoustique work for the Ministère de la culture of France. She composed for the Clocktower Gallery and its radio station ARTonAIR.org, New York, the continuation of the experimental live broadcast radio play The Starry Garter: A Certain Point Within A Sphere. In collaboration with Peter Edwards she was in residence at EMPAC in the Spring of 2012. She is the recipient of the New York State Council of the Arts/ Transmission Arts Grant for 2012. Sabisha is currently based in Paris and New York.