July 05, 2026
Sweet Wreath Newsletter No. 41
This Sunday July 12th 2-4pm at MAKE BHM!
Story quilts by Jenna Clark, with a musical performance by Sprigs : a group featuring Jenna Clark,
Ryan Brown, Sam Herman and Jasper Lee
Music sets will occur a couple times between 2 and 4pm
Make BHM: 4000 3rd Ave S, Birmingham, AL 35222
“Home Once” explores four stories centering on ideas of home, shelter, and places of belonging.
Part musical performance, part visual installation, this body of work features four story quilts &
semi-improvisational musical scores that highlight the fragmentation of interpersonal and comm-
unal relationships that occur from interacting through digital interfaces, by displaying different
personal stories in both part and whole. These stories act as grounding orientations, abstracted
reflections, and vignettes of place/landscape within North and Central Alabama.
We’re also giving an artist talk about the project at Make BHM on July 24th 6:30-8pm!
(photos by Aliza Scott from Sumac Cottage, May 8th, 2026)
For this project, each player in the group wrote a short story about ideas and sense memories of
home. Subjects ended up ranging from watching tiny plants grow in a window sill, to dealing with
a dead relative’s belongings, to exploring a construction site resembling the moon, to talking with
a cat during a thunderstorm. Then we developed music that would act as a score for each story.
We imagined each story as a scene with a musical sequence that is partially improvised around
certain keys and motifs. The theme of “home” made a lot of intuitive sense as we prepared to play
the material at Sumac Cottage, a house in Greensboro, Alabama built in the early 1800s. An old
house like that contains so many traces of the past in its physical layout and materials…..it can be
like walking into a memory. We wanted the music to evoke this feeling too. An element we added
to “materialize” the sound in a ghostly way was to use a tape player with recorded fragments of
text being read. We’ve also been experimenting with recording ourselves performing the music
and playing the tape back immediately to respond to. What this does to the listener is more com-
plex than it might seem at first. The music re-appearing in a lo-fi mediated form just after being
played live pushes the moment further into the past than seems possible? Like, all of a sudden
that musical moment sounds as if it could have been played at any point in history in the last
80-odd years (since the invention of the portable tape recorder.) This effect works best when the
music is played on acoustic instruments. The texture of the music becomes hazy and blurred, like
a charcoal drawing that someone has wiped their hand across…..it sounds like a memory. It sounds
like a memory from another time because almost everyone alive today came into a world where tape
recorders already existed. Tapes have always sounded OLD to us…..definitely not NEW.
The installation of Jenna’s quilts nearby illustrates aspects of our stories. The quilts are hung so that
people can wander through and around them to see both sides of the textile work. We also wanted
the texts themselves to be present in the space where we play. So we cut up the stories and made
poems which combined fragments of all four texts….pasted on the backs of old record jackets and
hung up for reading.
We’re currently using these cut-up poems to form experimental librettos, texts to sing with the music
we play. When we were warming up for the show in Greensboro, a neighbor heard Jenna singing very
high aria-like melodies and thought there was a ghost in her house!
After showing/performing “Home Once” at Sumac Cottage in May, we’re bringing it to Make BHM to
share with people in Birmingham this week. Hope to see you this Sunday!
ALSO!!!
This Thursday JULY 9th at Cha House!
Doors 7pm / Show 8pm
Great pal Joel Nelson is playing! Along with wackadoodle pop tones from Noble
and 11 Ghosts (Mika’s electric euphonium!)
A nice evening with a special set of music Joel prepared with Johnny Coley’s poetry.
Hope to see you there!
