In Abdomen, the voice of Metzger again lends an unsettling start, followed by an audio collage including original musical interventions, recordings of the Cambridgeshire countryside, and a reading of a passage from The Good Soldier Sveik, a satirical war novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek (1923), from another Wysing fellow resident artist, Cécile B. Evans. The piece, like the sound for the video, is composed by Patane, with long time collaborator Giancarlo Trimarchi.
Finally, the conclusive part of Abdomen features a short song written by Patane and sung and arranged with Berlin based musician Andrew Moss, a song inspired by Patane’s own occasional bouts of hypochondriasis, but also by the letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ford Madox Brown about a very ill and dying Lizzie Siddal, “I have been in the most agonizing anxiety about poor dear Lizzie’s heath, she has seemed ready to die daily and more than once a day” (1860).
Patane utilizes this juxtaposition between historical and personal source material in order to cross it with contemporary musical references, the process ultimately aided by a kind of psychedelic approach to music making. The artist’s aim is to create a current video/soundscape that hints at timeless and universal notions of ideas of anxiety; this leads towards a sense of lack of control over physical and emotional transformation and the horrors of war, clashes and conflict, albeit hinting at change and a death seen ultimately as renewal, followed by its consequent rebirth.
