Commissioned by Prospect Art in 2021, as part of our NEW WORK project grant program, Point of Turn utilizes two dozen moments that mark individual transitions out of organized religion. Nakagawa built a voice-based soundscape inspired by rock band 10CC’s I’m Not In Love, a seminal pop hit of the 1970s and arguably one of the first ambient music works, predating Brian Eno’s Music for Airports by over a year. Working with vocalists Evelyn Davis and Steven Speciale, Alan built a library of singing voices and, mimicking 10CC’s recording technique, created a dynamic sound work. Using the chord structure of one verse and one chorus from the pop hit and then stretching it into a half-hour multi-track recording of individual reasons why someone left their religion, interspersed within the landscape of singing voices. This is Nakagawa’s first work based on singing voices. As an agnostic, Nakagawa had always been fascinated by friends’ stories regarding how and why they left organized religion. These stories were often deeply powerful and moving. What if you collected explanations of the precise moment people made the decision to leave? If you combined that into a soundscape, what would that sound like? Could the experience of such a work be religious?

Point of Turn is a community-based project initiated with the data collection of short sound bites naming the moment that led individuals to break with religion. Not the complex history that led to it or the subsequent journey, but the story, the straw that broke the camel's back.

The project was launched with a free and open forum through a public Zoom meeting. In the meeting, Alan was in conversation with Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter. They introduced the project and invited the audience to share their point of turn. Bennett-Carpenter is the author of Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience (Brill, 2018) and Explaining Jesus: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of a Phenomenon (Lexington / Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).

We would like to thank christy Roberts Berkowitz for including Point of Turn in the “KCHUNG PUBLIC: Labor” programming.

Video documentation of the live performance courtesy of Prospect Art.