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Heart Throb

Sound, performance, text, drawings & musical score

February 2025 - ongoing​​

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A room pulses. Not with music exactly, but with the data of a body trying to translate itself into sound. In Heart Throb, Courtney Askey turns her own cardiac rhythms—captured through ECG—into the basis for a sonic performance. An unrelenting choreography of the body's interior. Developed in Lisbon earlier this year, the work operates on a system of chosen rules and involuntary signals, where music becomes not just something composed, but something lived.

 

Here, the artist’s body is both source and site. Using contact mics, metronomes, and effects pedals, Askey performs live—responding to the space in real time, allowing error, breath, and ambient interference to shape the sound.

Heart Throb beats at the messy intersection of labour, health, and creation. It asks how much of ourselves we give to our work, and what’s left when the performance is over. The result is a deeply personal system of listening—where art is not made about the body, but with it.

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Text by Anika Borko​​​

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