Describing his early compositional processes as ‘butchering’ in conversation with Simon Reynolds, the songs and voices that James Leyland Kirby, also known as The Caretaker amongst other aliases, has obsessively reworked, looped, stretched and otherwise deconstructed, appear as ghosts, eternally trapped in auditory labyrinths of melancholy decay; the sonic equivalent of stirring bottomless pools of murky water. Drawing on conceptions of hauntology from the work of Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Mark Fisher (1968–2017) and others, this article will explore The Caretaker’s use of ‘butchered’ voices in The Haunted Ballroom Trilogy and Patience (After Sebald), to explore the deconstructive labyrinths that are intrinsic to his work in Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom (1991) onwards.

In early 2019, Bad Bunny, a leading urbano latino artist, released the music video to his song ‘Caro’. As a musical track, the song can easily be heard as standard Latin trap fare that centres the ostentatious masculinity of its protagonist. The video, however, definitively disrupts gendered/generic norms by layering the performances of Bad Bunny and Jazmyne Joy, a model featured in the role of Bad Bunny. Their dual performance of a single persona, deploying both drag and ventriloquism, challenges the perceived boundedness of gender and genre by calling into question the boundaries of the body itself. Gender and genre are treated here as conceptual sisters that afford the rupture of their respective boundaries in the elaborative act of performance. Thus, in ‘Caro’, the theories of Judith Butler and Georgina Born are generatively exemplified and mutually illuminated, affirming the contingency and performativity at the centre of both.

In writing the histories of film practitioners such as C. Krishnaveni, one recognizes the value of how their vocalities, literal and metaphoric, as observers, creative artistes and enablers are indicative of the form that cinema has historically taken within specific spaces of language and culture. This article reviews key themes and developments around the encoding of voices of early actors and singers, places their contribution in the cultural and linguistic context of South India and notes their historical position in innovating with cinematic technologies and creating new musical and narrative materials.

Review of: Voices in and Out of Place: Misplaced, Displaced, Replaced and Interlaced Voices, Francesco Venturi, Virtual Conference, 6–7 September 2022

Review of: Singing Through Change: Women's Voices in Midlife, Menopause, and Beyond, Nancy Bos, Joanne Bozeman and Cate Frazier-Neely (2020) Suquamish, WA: Studiobos Media, 200 pp., ISBN 979-8-62231-764-4, p/bk, $23.99

In response to Rosemary Coombe’s provocation ‘Who authors the celebrity?’, this interview with actor, singer and impressionist Christina Bianco considers the process, performance and cultural politics of vocal impressions as a vicarious form of popular entertainment. Responding to Mladen Dolar’s assertion that voice can be located at the juncture of subject and Other (2006: 102) the discussion considers the performer’s reflections on the relationship between her own voice and those she ‘lives in’ during performance, the tensions between visuality and vocality in the creation and reception of impressions and the influence of new creative technologies and changing social mores which are changing whose voice(s) may be authored – and by whom.

Review of: Education, Music and the Lives of Undergraduates: Collegiate a Cappella and the Pursuit of Happiness, Roger Mantie and Brent C. Talbot (2020) New York: Bloomsbury, 161 pp., ISBN 978-1-35016-922-7, h/bk, £85.50

This article explores the stereotype of the ‘tiny girl with the big voice’ and discusses three singers, Jackie Evancho, Hollie Steel and Connie Talbot, who competed in televised talent competitions America’s Got Talent and Britain’s Got Talent at aged 10 or under during the early 2010s. Today, as adults in their twenties, the three women continue to pursue singing careers, navigating the public scrutiny that inevitably follows female child stars as they grow up. The first half of this article explores how the talent competitions framed the apparent incongruence between the young girls’ voices and bodies and their dehumanizing objectification in the press as ‘singing angels’ or ‘freaks’. Adapting a term from Jennifer Fleeger, the article describes these singers as ‘mismatched girls’. The second half of the article examines recent transformative moments in the adult lives of Evancho, Steel and Talbot that demonstrate how the women have used musical performances and social media to reimagine the relationship between their voices, bodies and identities. Managing their own careers and star texts as adults today, they transcend the ‘mismatched girl’ stereotype, refuting the cultural myth that certain voices inherently belong with certain bodies.

Successful integration of acting, voice and movement has long been desired in theatre-arts training. Existing systems, however, often offer three distinct and separate areas of performance training – at least within US higher-education curricular contexts. But, this article proposes, in team-teaching, we gain an experience of living the integration, of challenging the ways we traditionally teach exercises and of finding new ways to rework concepts and exercises taught to us. Consciously creating bridges across areas of training enables students to grow by experiencing two perspectives in the same classroom. Integration is the aim of a new ‘Introduction to Voice and Movement’ course created and team-taught by the authors of this article, a voice professor and a movement professor. We sought not only to merge voice and movement training within our university theatre department, but to re-evaluate how we approach teaching voice and movement. The experience became more than simply integrating voice and movement into one class. The discovery of pedagogical alignment resulted in the merging of two personal pedagogies. This merging became integration as students carried the physio-vocal training into their lives and artistry beyond the classroom.