Photgraphy by Tereza Červenová. Image Courtesy of the Artist.
In Rieko Whitfield’s Enter Regenesis — a multi-sensory ceremony commissioned by Jerwood Arts for their 2022 Staging Series — intimacy and power blend seamlessly in a performance-cum sonic storm. The London-based multidisciplinary artist performed unreleased music from her upcoming Regenesis EP (2023), a four-track outing that demonstrates her graceful ferocity.
A week before her multi-sensory performance art soirée, I arrange to meet Whitfield to discuss her practice. She tells me of her song-writing process, explaining it as a speculative methodology of fabulation—sensual words, celestial omens, and groaning melodies that come to her in meditative visions, are then woven together to create an allegorical mode of ambient, experimental pop. There are thought leapfrogs and mind zigzags, mixadelic detours creating off-world break-outs.
Both guide and provocateur, Whitfield’s rebellious approach to music and sound by energetically, corporally and mythically exploring them in bewildering assemblages delivers otherworldly pop music. The realm of Regenesis is one of multiple time regimes — of sprawling, shapeshifting soundscapes, flowing lightly between hushed introspection, dramatically cascading from ethereal highs, and dropping downwards into growling lows.
Set against the backdrop of a dramatically-lit mythological private members club at Jerwood Arts, silver curtains line the walls behind the stage. Frankincense burns around us—an essential oil extracted from tree sap and used in holistic medicine for its soothing and cleansing properties. Its sweet, woody, citrusy scent taps into the healing nature of Whitfield’s vulnerable and textured songs.
Photgraphy by Tereza Červenová. Image Courtesy of the Artist.
All is quiet before the unruly storm. A sonic meditation—using unique vibrations and harmonic waves to gently and deeply penetrate the body—washes over the audience, performed by the artist’s mother and sound healer, Noriko Whitfield. After this calmness, a single bell rings, declaring the onset of this seismic, traveling tempest. The artist slowly walks to the stage wearing a hand-made, freestyle crocheted top and black leather trousers. Wrapping herself around the microphone—similarly dressed with flowing tentacles of yarn—Whitfield opens with Mother Tongue, a track on the upcoming EP, singing:
In mother tongue I’m dreaming
In mother tongue I’m screaming
In mother tongue I’m dying to be heard
I’m dying to be
(Regenesis 2023)
The artist’s sweeping scales and pounding repeating notes unleash a slow-burning narrative that sets the rest of the album in motion. Spiraling chords build in volume and then drop away. Her voice sings the song’s title, stretching out the word “I” across a series of notes, as though it belonged to someone standing at the edge of the ocean, watching a storm roll in, hearing it rumbling in the distance, wondering when the rain will hit your face.
Warping her rhythms with cyclonic washes of synthesiser and haunting choral vocals, Whitfield offers a portal into her dreamy inner world. The artist knows about creating a tidal presence unattenuated by form or genre. Her early years of classical violin training,, her upbringing in Shinto and Buddhist philosophy, her teenage experiences in heavy metal subcultures, and her background in performance art combine in a techno-shamanistic practice rooted in collective healing. In performance, the artist’s non-verbal expressions and gestures carry remnants or trace elements of these influences. Everything feels new, referential but not imitable.
Photgraphy by Tereza Červenová. Image Courtesy of the Artist.
Stabbing synth lines–like heavy rain–soar across a metallic symphony of crying and howling hit my intestines and I enjoy it. In “Safe Spaces” the words “maybe I’ll heal…” are repeated again and again. Whitfield’s “Ashes to Ashes” is also filled with numerous repetitive words, including “this is the cycle,” and “ashes to ashes to ashes to ashes to ashes.” These restless operatic loops act as incantations, conjuring alternative timespaces through powerful and angsty vocals that brim over with raw emotion. This poetic, elusive sound from Whitfield, where she stretches words out in interconnected and invisible webs, changing the modulation or inflection of her voice from throaty long notes to short, sharp, high-pitched sounds, cultivates a deeply intense world equal parts soothing and stirring.
What becomes clear experiencing Whitfield’s sounding is how innate a polysensory and polyhistoric knowledge of composing is fundamental to her.
Whitfield’s liquid stylistic freedom intuitively pursues variation, creating waves that move me, swallowing me up in its flows. Both intimate and colossal, her rhythms have a uniquely visual element, moving with an aquaticism that contrasts with the artist’s booming vocal takes. Whitfield’s wild voice mirrors electrically charged spikes of lightning—her shrieking climactic squeals frighteningly spellbinding. As storms go, hers is a thunderous, free and capricious one.