Songs In Isolation I: Always Read the Instructions

Text from YouTube Description: "We're all trapped in isolation yet we're all mirroring each other's behaviour from afar. Many people have decided that home hairdressing is the way to go, whilst the instructions remain unclear and we're still pushed to produce. Hooray! Whoopsie! Millenium hand and shrimp."

This work was created in April-May 2020 in response to the early 2020 trend of dying one’s hair and mixed government communications about the pandemic. It uses speech, video, and audio effects created in Logic Pro X. The audio was recorded while dying my hair and giving an address to camera in a perky, lifestyle influencer/YouTuber tutorial style, paralleling the process of dying one’s hair to creating art in lockdown and continuing to live as a “productive member of society”.

A theme of the pandemic was globally mixed messaging concerning health recommendations. In early 2020, the news was flooded with opinions expressed as facts and insane medical advice was being spread by prominent political figures and anti-vaccination/COVID-deniers alike. The future was still being determined. In these conditions, home hairdressing thrived.

Reactions to trauma are always varied, but a common thread among women is the compulsion to change their appearance (usually after a relationship break-up but also in times of economic downturn (Danziger 2022; Bastiaansen, Thioux, and Keysers, 2009). On social media, many people had taken their haircare into their own hands at the sudden absence of salon slots and trundled down to the local supermarket to purchase box hair dye. The layering and glitchy audio are for the cycles of information-disinformation, the medical recommendations filtered through social media, and the near-mania many experienced after a month of lockdown.

Several lines of text are manipulated, including “In isolation, you really have to focus on solo projects” and “Always read the instructions first”. These lines were snarky takes on pressures from workplaces, governments, corporations, and universities to continue producing and consuming as expected. The facial expressions juxtapose the statements with grimaces, uncertain twitches, and sighs. The lines of text are manipulated in a DAW and fed through effects to create glitching sounds.