Kiera Mulhern - De Ossibus 20 (2020)

De ossibus 20 is the debut LP by sound artist and poet Kiera Mulhern (b.1992). Bridging classic sound poetry elements with micro studies of the artist’s body and environment. Burying a microphone in a book, this LP picks up fragments of words and memories, humming the rustles of parchment. It reminds me of Henri Chopin at times, busy mouth clusters bang against the air.

Kiera made this album as a means of organizing loss after her mother’s death. Recordings of her maternal grandfather and the inside of Mulhern’s throat explore parallel means of investigating family and what gets passed on. The particularities of her family, psychiatry & medicine, became ghosts she followed into the writings of Galen, whose notes on dissection and animal anatomy wind through the text of the LP. Archaeological notes and scraps from the myth of Syrinx blow through the ending of De ossibus 20, as distant pan pipes and flutes fold into each-other.