Rootmouth, Deconstructed Foley, Moleskine, 2024

Deconstructed Foley is a two-hour meditative live-looping performance built from the sounds of Moleskine notebooks, spatial ambient texture, voice, and guitar. Clicks, vocal waning, strumming, and the small noises a body forgets it makes are layered in real time. The work treats pedestrian foley as spiritual rapture, and its insistence on repetition speaks to lineages of devotion across Black spirituals and zikr. The throat works here in angular shape and color, perceiving time as a holding block of patience, restraint, and wonder. The piece now exists as an hour-long recording released by people | places | records in 2024.

Deconstructed Foley, 2024
Live-looping performance; voice, guitar, Moleskine notebooks, spatial ambient sound
Boss RC-505 MkII Loop Station, cables, paper
Duration: 2 hours (performance); 1 hour (recording)
Commissioned by SoMad
Released by people | places | records, 2024
Location of the live performance: Moleskine, Manhattan
Recording format: digital
Video credit: Domenica Garcia

RM

New Work
Root Mouthing
Frontmatter Kin

Previously
Music Gallery
Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Topanga Trio
East End United Church
Toronto, Ontario, 2025

“Deconstructed Foley”, 2024

“Black Gaze” (Visualizer), 2024

Museums as Systems
A Question of Love and Community Care
Studio Museum in Harlem, 2023

Care Manual: Dreaming Care into Being
5-week Experiential Learning Series
Dia Chelsea, 2022

Rootmouth is the project of New York-based Igbo American perception artist, Kamra. They work through sound, sculpture, installation, performance, and stewardship, sharpening the failed ocular toward the ears and throat system as a reliable ancient technology for transferring sensation intelligence across time. Where the eye has been given over to spectacle, the auditory tube works from the interior, where the future is born before it is known.

They conceptualize sounding structures that disrupt the folk casting of music, turning the insides out. The practice treats the body like a biological tuning fork, rendering corporeal sensory apparatus, channels of spiritship. The works are meant to take the form of rooms in the round, microphones the size of a body, hardwood bent to a curve and speakers and mics as eyes wired to sound and sing only what makes contact.

You enter, sound, and the sculpture returns your input the way the apse of a church does and the way a praise house would. Shoes come off at the edge creating pause and prayer. The work rests on the architecture of devotion and on the older fact that a body listens below the neck, through the feet and chest, through the ground it stands on and the heart that rhythms.

Represented by people | places | records