All mouth

Jo Warren

with Maddie Hopfield, Meg Herzfeld, Paris Cullen, Cullan Powers, Sofia Franklin

Original Music & Sound Design: Ryan Gamblin
Lighting Design: Connor Sale

Drawing points of inspiration from the pastel-and-saccharine suburbs of Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, the liturgical imagery of the Catholic Church, the picturesque violence of the Spaghetti Western, and the rugged individualism of the solo electric guitar, Warren and I worked symbiotically to create a sonic language that evoked the organizing structures and ideologies of (upper middle class, White, Christian) American Life. As Maia Sauer observed in the Brooklyn Rail: “Our organizing structures, Warren reminds us, are no more fixed than our emotions. The church, the family, and the countless other mythologies that structure American life are shared constructions.” As those structures come apart, forcefully disorganized by choreography, dialogue, and sound, the music erupts in dissonance, an interjection of sampling vocabulary, and the dark revelations, betrayals, and harms that the aforementioned structures were built upon show themselves.

The music for All Mouth uses a vocabulary of trope and archetype to present the ideological scaffolding that popular culture has built to reinforce established hierarchies, in order to disjunct, intervene, and present alternative futures for a relational landscape.

“Propelled by a warm, synth-heavy sound score by Ryan Gamblin, Jo Warren’s All Mouth turns off the subtitles as we watch images of the archetypal suburban American family crack, distort, and rebuild.” – Maia Sauer, Brookyln Rail

“A crack in the artifice, Warren leads us to mistrust the reality we’ve grown to associate with normality.” – Lucy Kudlinski, Culture Boy