Distraction Zone Staging for Hospitals and Clinics ("Room" transliterated for Occultations, now part of the performance pieces for Hospitalogy--the two "books" were at one point to exist together as one). This work is part of a multi-media performance (audio composition with live voice and video projection) that was initially commissioned for The Electroacoustic Music Festival, Olympia WA 2011. The audio here is still unfinished (see note below). This is the 2nd in a series of electroacoustic pieces that translates extant text for performance, both so far translating parts of the section "modular arterial cacophony," which is to say that they are really one piece in two movements, each designed for a different site (the whispered text carries over and is finished in this piece). Said found text was published as watermarked pages in Occultations a few months ago, with new print-run/edition out soon. The other "movement" is available here as link under "Selected Sound and Video Poetry Online" and is called "Wave." Eff Why I.
Note: really the only way for the piece to be as grating and grungey as it would sound, say, with huge theater speakers, would be to listen via headphones. Or so I've come to experience it anyhow.
Details/Specs: 4-Channel Composition using statistical recursion software and decay modulation using manual reverbing (one recording is played back into a microphone, then again, and so forth, four times). All manipulated sounds aside from the voiced text source from recording the inside of the MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) Machine during test (of brain and cervical spine). Recording from 2006. Ambient noise (what may sound like static) comes from the ambient sounds of the room--tech voices, footsteps, body moving/adjusting near the machine, etc. This work is still in draft form: each layer still needs be filtered more so that the original recording (necessarily low quality) can be maximized for high quality resolution speakers.
Video components include a "silent shadow" of the live actions: a live reading during slow compression of the neck by use of ducked tape that is wound round the throat and cervical spine as subject lies on folding table. The live voice's capacity for projection is thus suppressed until it is no longer audible over the recorded layers. Video projects same, but inside the room I did not leave for 2 months, save to go to work, and once to a reading. I was thinking about neoliberal enclosure enclosures: the enclosures that we build within neoliberal enclosures, recapitulation, miniature zones of constriction that pass as entertainment and domicile. Or something.
***
In other news, I got to hear a helluva concert this evening, despite my sadness of not being able to head to NY this week--still feeling poorly, so glad I made the "right" choice, but still. The concert was darn good distraction from that disappointment tho. I read some work with E, participatory, fun to have use of the experimental theater and be with lovely (and deeply exciting!) composers. We, poetic interlopers! Stephane Brun has gone to our ensemble's rehearsals while in town, has been so kind and helpful in critique--such a lovely person. Check out his work in performing arts (out of Chicago, Urbana, where for years now some of the more exciting cybernetic composition and other performing arts collaborating has been going on--a quick google of his work aught to be well worth it). I'll write a "review" (debrief/overview) of the evening's guest composers' work in another post. But for now just to say the evening was great and that the ensemble I work with, their stuff I thoroughly enjoyed (was nice this week to be more on the periphery, more audience to the art-making). I liked how poetry met musical composition tonight, rarer from the "music side" of things than one would imagine (these folks from Urbana, like those out of Madison and elsewhere, many involved in The School for Designing Society and The Nonsense Company respectively, these folks are rather special in that their interests are wide-open, their aesthetic production isn't interested in categories or commodity, and their enthusiasm for collaboration is infectious). New work from Arun Chandra was fantastic, first time I've heard this new piece he's been working on. But of all the work put forth by our ensemble (again, more on the other composers' work later), I have to say that the highlight for me was a "Cagean" work by Ben Michaelis and Molly McDermott, Ben an Evergreen alum and Molly a current student. They performed a work for kitchen utensils, metallic beads, calculator, keys, water, and voice--that had me (oddly) fist-pumping. The score itself is pretty gorgeous, so I'm hoping to borrow it to scan it in here at a later date. It was/is, perhaps, the most astonishingly fresh piece of the evening. And of course I had to read poetry right after them!
Quite tired, long day, but glad I was dragged out for a bit to hear new work tonight. But now... now I can't sleep. 4:08am. G'night.
No comments:
Post a Comment