"Untitled discrete arbitrary input functions" is dedicated to my two nieces and my memories of their early-developmental oligodynamic and repetitive cluster-thudding diatony on my father's piano. Unsure if they were intending to annoy my father or merely amuse themselves—or both—the rhythmic qualities of their piano playing as obediently, reflexively gravitational—as if the keyboard were magnetically attracting the undisciplined, quasi-hostile actions of temporarily blithesome children—came to mind when listening back to early drafts of this piece. Upon simul-crashing the piano—in the sense of 'crashing the party' of piano music, a 'crash-course' in piano technique mutated after Ustvolskaya, and literally physically crashing down upon the keyboard—in their mostly harmonically diatonic yet rhythmically microtonal manner they perhaps failed as musicians, but succeeded as composers of a transient form that could not develop beyond its punishing reiteration. I have some sort of memory of trying to stupidly suggest they impute more accidentals into the diatonically-saturated crashings redundantly being spread across registers of the tetrachordal hellscape. But why? To appease my facile 'learned' intuitions of global structural coherence (between, say, rhythm and pitch-class structure)? Probably, given that I'm a dumb bitch with no relationship to children. At the time of this writing, I haven't had any communication with my nieces in years. Why's that, Kieran? Do they even exist? What is this little narrative about your so-called "nieces" plonking down on the keys—some sort of pitifully vain 'domestic anecdote' in-group signaling? Excuse me, sorry, that was my cousin Kaden chiming in to denigrate Me and My Work again.

Q: What is this piece about?

A: Generally, it's about divergent periodic sequences of repeating sets of time-point classes distributed across similarly divergent registral spans. Such divergence is intended to define a global polyphonic texture that maintains structural independence between sequences while simultaneously defining contrast and similarity among them.

Q: That's so abstract, I'm considering petitioning for your cancellation.

A: Fair enough. As one might be able to observe, many of the sequences projected by each 'hand' of the keyboard are repeating sequences. These repeat in order to determine temporal and overall textural definition and distance between adjacent sequences. Thus, while the work is totally polyphonic, each sequence is defined as a texture parametrically non-intersecting—whether that parameter be register, pitch-class structure, or tempo—not only in relation to its antecedent but also the sequence to which it is polyphonically 'simultaneous'. Dissonances are established both through displacement of synchronous downbeats between voices and the structural distance between adjacent sequences within each voice. This is to elide any salient metrical boundaries that might supervene and thus 'condition' how such concurrent sequences are structurally grouped.

Q: How was this piece composed?

A: Quite arbitrarily, as indicated by the title. Each 'hand' of the harpsichord was composed independently. And by composed, I mean improvised on the guitar and converted in real-time to MIDI data. Once one track was performed, another would be performed in the same manner and superimposed. Then each track was significantly edited, primarily to elide unintended artifacts resultant of the voltage-to-MIDI conversion process. Finally, each track i.e. 'hand' was tuned a quarter-tone apart from each other.

FURTHER READING

Johnson, W. M. (1984). Time-Point Sets and Meter. Perspectives of New Music, 23(1), 278-293.

Polansky, L. (1996). Morphological metrics. Journal of New Music Research, 25(4), 289-368.

Tenney, J., & Polansky, L. (1980). Temporal gestalt perception in music. Journal of Music Theory, 24(2), 205-241.

Thomas, M. (2000). Nancarrow's "Temporal Dissonance": Issues of Tempo Proportions, Metric Synchrony, and Rhythmic Strategies. Intégral, 137-180.

Song & Transcription with References

7:47

To decide what to write is a problem of a different order

Part 1: SORT IT ALL OUT AND END UP WITH A SICK OBJECTIVITY

1. Here’s another tableau of intimacy that won’t respond to questions. (LEPSELTER 2004)
2. I found myself particularly moved by this video clip; it was silent (likely by some encoding error) but I think that the silence moved me further. (SHESHADRI 2020)
3. Empathy is rough. (UNATTRIBUTABLE 2008)
4. Remember When is the lowest form of conversation. (SOPRANO 2006)
5. I feel I can give you everything without giving myself away. (NELSON 2015)
6. As we became less sure what came from one, what came from the other, or even from someone else, we would become clearer about “What is it to write?”. (DELEUZE & PARNET 1980)
7. I had hoped that everyone there would be new, that there would be no one I had ever met before. That way, I could put on a new set of airs; I could say I was something that I was not, and no one would ever know the difference. (KINCAID 1983)
8. Had she been a direct inspiration for his work? Had he been a tyrant? An uncompromising lover? Was there going to be another episode in their dark drama, or was this the end? (DE JONG 1977)
9. A tough, ambiguous depiction of traditionally female imagery. (CRIMP 1972)
10. The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be happy. (AHMED 2010)

Part 2: ARE YOU RELENTLESS OR UNRELENTING?

1. A paranoiac treasure hunt, incriminatory, clues planted everywhere around the seasick room. (KRAUS 251)
2. Bars had a hyper-plain intimacy of a sixties basement rec room. (BERLANT & STEWART 2019)
3. Wallabies may be breeding in the wild in Britain. Artificial light may be driving mosquitos from day-biting to night-biting. Colorado spruce forests killed by beetles become mildly cooler, and Guam’s coconut rhinoceros beetles have started burrowing into cycad trees. (FINDINGS 2020)
4. We were warned about spiders, and the occasional famine. We drove downtown to see our neighbors. None of them were home, we nestled in yards the municipality had created. (ASHBERY 2004)
5. Dread fears the event, too, because it’s only going to be confirming of the time one suffers as the historical present. Dread looks forward to rest from even the possibility of the event. (BERLANT 2011)
6. During the trial, all the city all the city’s penny papers fabricated information and embellished their stories in a tawdry effort to keep the public enthralled. (GONZALEZ & TORRES 2011)
7. The historical society is a lackey of the real estate agents. (KING 1971)
8. The society immediately adjacent to where they now live -- the police and the administration -- still see them as thieves, robbers, criminals. And definitely use them in criminal activities. (MAHASWETA 1971)
9. I, the sovereign, who am outside the law, declare that there is no outside the law. (AGAMBEN 1997)
10. Unrelenting: not softening or yielding in determination; relentless showing or promising no abatement of severity, intensity, strength, or pace. (MERRIAM-WEBSTER 2020)

Part 3: CRUEL TAXONOMIES

1. People are different from each other. Unfortunately, the dynamic of becoming a spokesperson almost always threatens to bury this fact. You may keep saying that you only speak for yourself, but your very presence in the public sphere begins to congeal different into a single figure, and pressure begins to bear down hard upon it. (NELSON 2015).
2. It is simply wrong to begin with a theme, symbol, or other abstract unifying agent, and then try to force characters and events to conform to it. (BARTHELME 1984)
3. fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the Net; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. (EDELMAN 2004)
4. To be honest within the limits permitted by the profession, I wondered whether it would not be necessary to show the personality of my subject in another light. (CORTAZAR 1967)
5. What are its distinguishing features? What did I discover? What did I find curious? (GREEN 2014)
6. You’re suggesting (FEATURE OF GOOGLE DOCUMENTS 2020)
7. Although documents are frequently scripted with posterity in mind, history in one sense is an afterthought, only incidentally related to the sources that are fetishized as so fundamental to the craft of history itself. (DIRKS 2002)
8. But there are times when the narrator forgets themselves, as Beckett often does, and finds something too interesting or too grotesquely funny to be bothered about questioning its role in the narrative, its truth or its fictiveness. (TOIBIN 2011)
9. The day’s lesson drones on, but the camera is more interested in what the pupils see: a feather they keep. (SEALE 2020)
10. The lesson here, obvious but now, and then overlooked, is just to corroborate one’s data, in particular those acquired casually, such as through hearsay or off the backs of record albums. (BARTHELME 1984)

- AS

Like many musicians, I have been particularly interested in the music recording medium and its relationship to live performance. In its history, the format shifted from a document of an actual event (ie. a ‘record’) into an idealized construction.

Through the usage of various reverbs and spatialization, producers construct an artificial sound stage. Like the films of Georges Méliès, the medium places the listener in an idealized position, front and center before the theatrical stage, without the interference of other audience members, environmental sounds, or any hint of the quotidian function of music. Even in the ‘live recording’ (now a necessary distinction between the fictional ‘record’), a fader on the mixing console can reveal the sonic evidence of an audience before quickly diminishing it.

While reverb frequently invokes architecture such as rooms, halls, chambers, cathedrals, etc. (convolution reverb allows for the acoustic modeling of specific real spaces), the presentation still duplicates the modernist orthodoxy of the ‘white cube’: hypothetically without historical or geographical context. In “Room, Chamber, Hall”, reverb is not simply considered as a neutral, physical phenomenon utilized to place sounds on the ‘stage’. What is the significance of augmenting a music performance with the architectural reverberation of a cathedral? Does this space mean something different than a small room?

Accepting the myriad of functions of music outside of an idealized, empty concert hall, “Room, Chamber, Hall” presents its locales with the presence of bodies attending to their physical needs and desires such as eating, dancing, sex, etc..

- WS

PRESENTISM

Within the philosophies of time, three oppositional schools compete: Eternalism describes the phenomenon of time like a strip of film - the past and the future do exist, are real, but the present is merely a human concept. The growing block theory, maybe the most intuitive of the three, states that the present continually creates the past, but the future is unwritten. Presentism on the other hand argues that the only thing irrefutable is the present and that the past and the future are both unreal. By applying these three concepts to music, we may end up with a number of strategies to rethink what we consider as given.

I would like to propose that there has been has been a slow shift in how music was perceived. Improvised music, prior to notation, can be considered as presentistic, manifesting itself only in the present, it’s only traces of existence written in memory. With interpretation and notation, the perception shifts more to a growing block. The mind got a hold of the past, but the future still remained a very unstable realm - once the hand made a mistake with an instrument or the voice was interrupted to catch a breath. Obviously the advent of the recording introduced an absolute future and with it the concept of eternalism in music. Furthermore the introduction of the loop, applied in its most extreme way within techno, embeds the listener in a coherent body of past and future, even with a view of the timeline - first on the record, later on the waveform. A car, racing on the Autobahn, free to move in both directions. Of course, one could argue that the state of ecstasy in which techno is consumed compresses time into a perfect present, the psychological present, which is defined as 2-3 seconds with the equivalent of 1 bar by 120 bpm…

But staying for the moment with the first thought, we can ask the questions: is the loop the defining property of techno? What happens if we remove the certainty of the next kick, eroding the temporal and structural integrity of the genre? Presentism is a project based on one temporal randomised pulse, denying our ability to foresee the next kick and obscuring the possibility to form loops. Yet it upholds timbres and instrument references common to the genre. The aleatoric function acts like an agent of presentism in an eternalist domain. Like improvisation, it has the ability to remove a stable future and at the same time blur the memory by forming insignificant patterns. Intensification usually benefits from a balance between control and the prospect of collapse. The temporal shuffle of techno is the attempted surrender of control of the past and future to the present.

- JAT

collaborative record forthcoming Spring 2021 on Diagonal

In the moment of disaster, the old order no longer exists and people improvise rescues, shelters, and communities. Thereafter, a struggle takes place over whether the old order with all its shortcomings and injustices will be reimposed or a new one, perhaps more oppressive or perhaps more just and free, like a disaster utopia, will arise.

- Rebecca Solnit from A Paradise Built in Hell

2020 is a tectonic shift, a rapidly changing reality of intertwined symbiotic cause and effect events. The precarity of life, health and care, ignored for so long by those wielding political power, are catalyzed front and center by the pandemic. As the fascist U.S government rants about antifascists and calls to sacrifice whole communities to “the economy” -- the distinction between those wearing masks and those who refuse echo within all areas of existence.

A phone call and I am outside. Handing over a paper bag with shields to Tom who is wearing a respirator. Tom and I had never met until that very moment. He is one of over 30 people who came together to make and deliver protective face shields to essential workers.

For two months the soundtrack for many of us was the overlapping howling of sirens on the streets. Each siren -- a life, tied to multiple lives trying to save it.

The sound piece presented here is a full cycle of 3D printers printing frames for protective shields. Four 3D printers printed shield frames for two months 24/7 to meet the immediate need for personal protective equipment in New York; and as time progressed, other states and countries. The continuous chorus of 3D printing frames for protective shields became a song I would hum as I lived with the never ending cycle of rapid prototyping for a rapidly spreading emergency. It became a second layer for the ambulance soundtrack during my time in lockdown. The full cycle lasts just over 5 hours and results in frames for shields donated to essential workers during the height (at the time of writing this on June 14, 2020) of the Covid-19 pandemic.

An invisible transmission of vibrations from matter to matter is present in my installations. Permeating objects, vibrations are amplified and modulate the sound differently depending on the object's materiality; as does the virus --- transmitting through proximity, amplifying, growing and affecting each body differently, depending on their materiality, on their history and prior interaction with the world.

The intangible mutates… altering tangible objects, creating presence, effecting change with an invisible force.

- LD

There are always images

if there are not we imagine them

if they are not outside we seek for them inside

if they are outside we adapt them

There are always images

words are images

sounds become an image

the wind becomes an image

happiness is an image

We wait for them

Do we need them?

They come out on their own

The images that we already have

the ones we recognize

the ones we create from the ones we already have

those that accumulate

dogmatic, hegemonic

those which prevail in history

The world reveals itself through images

images create the world

the image of the world. A spherical blue and green shape floating on a black background

When and how did I get to know that image? Who showed it to me the first time I saw it?

How did the world think before having it?

Does the world exist without it?

and now that I have it, could I forget it?

The world without image

the world without what is thinkable

is the world of the possible

of the contingency

lots of worlds, other orders?

The image of the other

the unknown

the outside

The image of threat?

The images themselves

Perhaps I should leave the question aside

It seems like it's taking us to a familiar place

I invited 9 people to listen to the Hole - a hole more than 8 meters deep located in the courtyard of the industrial building where I live. In order to access it you have to go down a set of emergency stairs.

The hole is a dark cavity

a tunnel towards something that we cannot reach

we don't fit in it

but we want to fit.

The hole is a container

of our own answers

a container of desire

and a place to wait for that desire

We listen to the hole

if it answers our questions

The hole lacks something

that we always want to fill

Infer

Signify

Appropriate

We look at each other

in a black circle

of 10 cm diameter

The Hole, halfway between action and sound installation, is a recording which documents a collective listening session of a hole. The session was held in May 2020 and it tries to explore states of contingency where the self is continually negotiated with the other, experiencing how listening can be determined by expectations, longings, fears and everything that comes from the participants' (and listeners) reading code.

The hole is presented here as the favorable scenario in which one could put into practice a term I’ve dubbed contingent objects, which also gathers some of my latest work where I try to investigate the concept of Alterity from a socio-semiotic perspective. Contingent objects refers to situations which as a practice experiment with how The Self appears in collision with The Other, acting as a force that in advance tends to cancel the possibility of thinking that which does not pass through the conceptual network of representation. Thus, symbolic structures appear as mediating and modeling figures of things in context and above all as legitimizing mechanisms of hegemonic realities and ideologies.

These systems of representation encode the knowledge of the "external" and contemplate in a massive and general way the difference that limits them to a possible and dominant reality. The same image makes the Other become both interior and strange; it also reduces the limit experience of the exterior to contours, lights, shadows, lines, points. In this way, to seek meaning is to impose similarities so that the Other is configured as an instrument in which you seek so that the unknown can be thinkable. The Own provides a mentality, a genealogy, an atmosphere and most importantly allows it to be treated as a phenomenon with regular characteristics, limiting itself to a process of closure or domestication.

The Other, as a synonym for the unknown, the outside, the strange, the Uncertain or the invisible, threatens to destabilize ideological dogmas,whose only possible defense is to project and infer recognizable schemes consistent with the belief system that perceives it. However, the external is revealed as a non-place from which to reflect on the limits of the thinkable, disobedience and the renewal of the Self.

My research, which began in Mexico in 2015, has given rise in my last works to study the hole as a contingency stage, as a pre-sign space in which significance has not yet been imposed,in which to be able to experience the Outside, the non-representable freed from the image or the postulates or on the contrary to dive into the logic of meaning and recognition of the Self.

On the other hand, my work also explores from a more political perspective the excavation as a disturbance, cracking, an anomaly that reveals the impenetrability of institutional structures.

__________________

Siempre hay imágenes

si no hay, las imaginamos

si no están fuera, las buscamos dentro

si están fuera, las adaptamos

Siempre hay imágenes

las palabras son imágenes

los sonidos se vuelven imagen

el viento se vuelve imagen

la felicidad es una imagen

Las esperamos

¿Las necesitamos?

aparecen solas

Las imágenes que ya tenemos

las que reconocemos

las que creamos a partir de las que ya tenemos

las que se acumulan

dogmáticas, hegemónicas

las que prevalecen en la Historia

El mundo se nos revela a través de imágenes

Las imágenes crean el mundo

La imagen del mundo. Una forma esférica azul y verde flotando en un fondo negro.

¿Cuándo y cómo conocí esa imagen? ¿Quién me la enseñó por primera vez?

¿cómo pensaba el mundo antes de tenerla?

¿Existe ese mundo sin ella?

y ahora que la tengo ¿Podría olvidarla?

El mundo sin imagen

el mundo sin lo pensable

es el mundo de los posibles

de la contingencia

muchos mundos ¿Otros órdenes?

Lo imagen de lo Otro

lo desconocido

el afuera

¿La imagen de la amenaza?

Las propias imágenes

Tal vez debería dejar a un lado la pregunta

Parece que nos lleva hacia un lugar conocido

Invité a 9 personas a escuchar el Hoyo, un agujero de más de 8 metros de profundidad que se encuentra en el patio al que conduce las escaleras de emergencia traseras del edificio industrial en el que vivo.

El hoyo es una cavidad oscura

Un túnel hacia algo que no podemos alcanzar

No cabemos.

pero queremos caber.

El hoyo es un contenedor

de nuestras propias respuestas

un contenedor de deseos

un lugar donde esperarlos

Al hoyo lo escuchamos

si responde a nuestras preguntas

Algo le falta al hoyo

que siempre queremos rellenar

Inferir

Significar

Apropiar

Nos miramos

en un círculo negro

de 10 cm de diámetro

El Hoyo, a medio camino entre la acción y la instalación sonora, es una grabación que documenta una sesión de escucha colectiva de un agujero. La sesión se realizó en Mayo de 2020 y trata de explorar estados de contingencia en dónde lo propio es continuamente negociado con lo otro, experimentando cómo la escucha puede estar determinada por las expectativas, los anhelos, los miedos y todo aquello que proviene de los códigos de lectura de los participantes oyentes.

El hoyo, se presenta aquí como el escenario propicio para poner en práctica un término al que ha llamado "contingent objects" y que agrupa a algunos de mis últimos trabajos que tratan, desde una perspectiva socio-semiótica, investigar el concepto de Alteridad. "Contingent objects" hace referencia a situaciones que ponen en práctica cómo Lo propio aparece en la colisión con lo Otro actuando como una fuerza que tiende por anticipado a cancelar la posibilidad de pensar aquello que no pasa por la red conceptual de la representación. Así, aparecen las estructuras simbólicas como figuras mediadoras y modelizantes de las cosas en el contexto y sobre todo como mecanismos legitimadores de las

realidades e ideologías hegemónicas. Estos sistemas de representación codifican el conocimiento de lo “externo” y plantean de forma masiva y general la diferencia que los acota en una realidad posible y dominante. La misma imagen hace que lo Otro se vuelve a la vez interior y extraño, que la experiencia límite de lo de afuera quede reducida a unos contornos, luces, sombras, trazos, puntos. De esta manera, buscar el sentido es imponer semejanzas para que lo Otro se configure como un instrumento al que se acude para que aquello desconocido pueda ser pensable. Lo Propio proporciona una mentalidad, una genealogía, una atmósfera y, lo más importante, permite tratarlo como un fenómeno con unas características regulares, limitándose a un proceso de clausura o de domesticación.

Lo Otro, en tanto sinónimo de lo desconocido, del afuera, lo extraño, lo Incierto o lo invisible amenaza con desestabilizar los dogmas ideológicos y cuya única defensa posible es proyectar e infererir unos esquemas reconocibles coherentes con el sistema de creencias que lo percibe. Sin embargo, lo externo se revela como un no lugar desde donde reflexionar acerca de los límites de lo pensable, la desobediencia y la renovación de lo Propio.

Todo esta investigación, que empezó en México en el año 2015, a dado lugar en mis últimos trabajos a estudiar el hoyo como un estadio de contingencia, como un espacio del pre-signo en el que todavía no se ha impuesto la significación y en el cual poder vivir el Afuera, lo no representable liberado de la imagen o los postulados o por el contrario sumergirse en las lógicas de sentido y reconocimiento de lo Propio.

Por otro lado, mi trabajo también explora desde una perspectiva más política la excavación como perturbación, resquebrajamiento, anomalía que pone de manifiesto el hermetismo de las estructuras institucionales.

- VM

But sounds have been heard in the sky. They have been heard, and it is not possible to destroy the records of them. They have been heard. In their repetitions and regularities of series and intervals, we shall recognize perhaps interpretable language. Columns of clouds, different- colored by sunset, have vibrated to the artillery of other worlds like the strings of a cosmic harp, and I conceive of no buzzing of insects that can forever divert attention from such dramatic reverberations. Language has shone upon the dark parts of the moon: luminous exclamations that have fluttered in the lunar crater Copernicus; the eloquence of the starlike light in Aristarchus; hymns that have been chanted in lights and shades upon Linné; the wilder, luminous music in Plato-

- Charles Fort “New Lands”

Note:

For the past 7 years, under the project Lxv I have attempted to instigate occurrences of apophenia, the “unmotivated seeing of connections accompanied by a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness” (K. Conrad); by obscuring language and sounds and taking prerecorded samples and field recordings and processing them in a way to create time distortions and auditory contraptions. If we understand “modern media technology- ever since the invention of film and gramophones- as fundamentally arranged to undermine sensory perception” (F. Kittler) then, if successful, I was just cascading upon a preexisting illusion. I am interested in the idea of pattern recognition in music, and an often thin leash to which a listener may follow deviations from an expected path; presented by such elements as tempo, beat, genre and other given parameters. It is said that rhythm is the one indispensable element of all music. I have a horrible sense of rhythm, maybe its because my ears are crooked on my head, but where exactly is the rhythmic line? Plato's observation is that rhythm is simply “an order of movement”. The sounds presented in this mix represent my own tendencies to seek out, or to recognize patterns, maybe where they are not; in white noise, clicks, interference, in random sound occurrences. The sounds are mostly gathered from my own amateur experiments in the field with VLF and shortwave radios, from electronic interference in my faulty consumer electronics, from exchanging image file data as sound, and from static.

Order of sounds:

Number Station (FDR Park, Philadelphia, tuned by Kira, 4/19/20)

Radio Low Pass (year unknown)

Thunderstorm received by “Tesla” style open tuned crystal radio (Girard Ave. Philadelphia, 9/18/18)

Dual Oscillators Pure data (year unknown)

Realistic Synth (3/20)

Field Recording (Frazeysburg, Ohio, 5/17)

Shit Charger (Year Unknown)

VLF Radio (The Serpent Mound, Ohio, 5/17)

Roland SP808EX (Year Unknown)

VLF Pitched (Year Unknown)

Shortwave, Thunderstorm (4/20)

Shortwave, Bit reduced (3/20)

Unknown JPEG (Year unknown)

Radio Arrangement (3/20)

- DS

A Reader Response Exercise for 10 Participants & GRM Sample Pack

“With some conceptual tools, we will be able to find one or several desirable directions for music without having to obey to the dictatorship of technology. For example, the possibilites [sic] of AI in music is in the air nowadays. Lots of people are talking about it but it’s striking how little we think about what music actually is or should be. How can we have a valid opinion on the new possibility computer sciences offer to us as composers if we don’t think harder about the purpose of music itself? That’s one fascinating topic we are really willing to explore at GRM, in order to find the most relevant path in our R&D and software development, but also as composers and music lovers. Experimenting now is not trying every possible technological tool in order to build new sounds and new music. That was the childhood of experimental music, much needed and exciting, but still a childhood. Experimenting now is trying to find what music still can be in a world where almost everything is reduced to signals and information.” (www.ableton.com)

This recording is an excerpt from a long-duration complex polyrhythm, which consists of the beats of 100 different tempos. Each click on the track corresponds to a beat in one of the rhythmic layers. The number of beats for each voice in a complete cycle (at which point all the voices would sound exactly together) are listed below.

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a confused apparatus of sequencers with variable degrees of randomization functioning in some variation of tandem -::each alleatorically progressing through respective possible steps, a range of values sometimes plucked, chance driven from a pool of possibilities, some drunkenly staggered through miscellaneous orderings of predetermined values, sometimes running a prescripted line in proper order

& some degree of connectivity between each channel of data being output::- i.e. amplitude restrictions and allowances envelopes generated based on the data produced by one sequencer draped onto another but frequently swapped vice versa or onto some third or forth etc. element and back implying some correlative relation without definitive chain of causation

conceptual choices for samples or synthesizer sound profiles are vague the impetus for this recent body of work has been to provide some form of self guided abstracted meditation for the listener and dip into school of ‘ambience’ articulated in some infinitely non repetitious scene-passing-window of slowly moving nightcar allowing a tap into and out of with ease;;-

generally lately of the form of some thoroughly carved acapella vocalist processed into affected theatrics joined with some number of processed and relatively clean virtual synthesizers some found sounds some anachronistic digital instrument protocol equivalent to midi, soundfont, arguably more operable in max coming together hopefully cohesively into what intends to be a fragile mosaic of sound, tension between nearrhythms asymptotically dialoguing each other from as close a distance without convergence possible, some amorphous theoretical sculpture on the verge of collapse

- RW

From a conversation I had with Eric Laska over the phone, we discussed ideas and challenges of a work-in-progress I had been developing under my moniker Ex Continent titled Sistemes Dintre de Sistemes Dintre de Sistemes. The piece was originally presented at FASE Art Center in L’Hospitalet, Spain but later commissioned by Sonic Acts to be shown at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. During its development some doubts arose about how to properly re-introduce the piece and what my personal expectations would be from presenting it in public.

During February 2020 I took several trips to the UK and Japan where I had the chance to perform as Ex Continent and test some of these ideas. While traveling, my encounter with the other, the unknown influenced the creative process and my relationship with the piece.

The conversation, which starts centered on the nature of the piece eventually becomes self-reflective around the argument that the cognitive processing of everyday life information might possibly affect perception and creative decisions more than we would expect. During the conversation I became uncomfortable with the idea of obsession as a source element for creation. The discussion brought me back to the subject of human perception and my belief that neurological stimulation which happens in the subconscious can sneak into our decision making processes, reinforcing the idea of the artist as a channel for information rather than the source.

As both this project and conversation reflect a work-in-progress, further reflections on this subject are on-going.

The following people were crucial through this process and for that reason I would like to especially thank them:

Violeta Mayoral, Rafa Romero, my mom and brother Pep, Eric Laska, Patricio Rivera and FASE, Dali de Saint Paul, Miguel Prado, Kazumichi Komatsu, Hideki Umezawa, Kazunori Toganoki, Fuyumi Murata and Mumei, Marzia Matarese, the organization folks at Sonic Acts, Stedelijk Museum and all the many technicians and workers at the festival who helped me put the piece together.

Arnau Sala Saez, Barcelona February 2020.

Audio Recordings:

—Fushimi Inari Shrine Ritual (interrupted), Kyoto

—Bristol pre-Concert

—Ex Continent Live Bristol - Excerpt

—Tokyo Central ambiance

—Unknown Performance - Setsubun at Sensō-ji Temple

—Tokyo Central ambiance

—Taito Station, Asakusa

—Ex Continent Live Tokyo - Excerpt

—Pachinko in Asakusa, Tokyo

—Ambiance from Kazumichi Komatsu’s Live set, Tokyo

—Ex Continent Live Tokyo - Excerpt

—Tokyo Subway, Chuo Line

—Ex Continent Live Bristol - Excerpt

—Tokyo Subway, Chuo Line

—Tokyo Mall, Asakusa

—Ex Continent - Sound from installation at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

*Note: I used some of Rafa Romero’s source saxophone improvisations and heavily processed them for a lot of my live recordings used in these performances.

More info — https://arnausalasaez.com/

When creating this sound piece, I wanted to incorporate modalities that have helped me and fascinated me throughout the years.

Time is an illusion. Our Subconscious Minds cannot gauge what time it is or what reality we are living in. The Subconscious mind is operating on past patterns. All you need to do is install new patterns in your supercomputer (your mind) for a new reality.

Source material:

Recording of a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Timeline Therapy session

Excerpts read from Personality Profile Through Handwriting Analysis by D. John Antony, O.F.M.Cap.

Field recordings (handwriting – lead pencil on paper)

GSR device

Supercollider

If you can influence your brain to change before you experience

a desired future event, you will create the appropriate neural

circuits that will enable you to behave in alignment with your

intention before it becomes a reality in your life. Through your

own repeated mental rehearsal of a better way to think, act, or be,

you will “install” the neural hardware needed to physiologically

prepare you for the new event...

So can you believe in a future you cannot yet see or experience

with your senses but have thought about enough times in your

mind that your brain is actually changed to look like the experience

has already happened ahead of the physical event in your

external environment? If so, then your brain is no longer a record

of the past, but has become a map to the future. (Dispenza, 2012, p. 52)

Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself - How to Lose Your Mind and Create a New One by Dr. Joe Dispenza

- EP 2/6/2020

STS (2019) is an 8-channel installation work comprised of recordings made over a 15-year period on differing Serge Modular systems recorded at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, the Columbia Computer Music Center, Elektron Musik Studion, the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, Harvard University Studio for Electro-Acoustic Composition, and Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio convolved with fragments of speech, recitation, and extra-textual verbal communication.

Partly an homage to formative speech-transformation works such as Herbert Eimert’s “Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama (1960-1962)”, the mapping of the frequency spectra of time-aligned formants to a catalog of full-range synthesizer signals yields a warm, attenuated field of sustained sound that ebbs through each space at a modest volume, inviting the listener to dwell on individual timbres, phrases, and conversations while assessing the overall sound-field. Utilizing a sliding, modular structure to diffuse linked stereo pairs of convolutions into 4 discrete chambers, the individual parts become groups of voices heard distinctly, overheard from the next room, or made subliminally aware of via bleed-through from each adjoining space.

This stereo track was presented as part of the debut staging of the full 8-channel piece at Remote Viewing in Philadelphia on April 28th, 2019.

I noticed a long strand of VHS tape entwined around a power line running adjacent to a bridge that crosses over a freight train yard. I walked across the bridge everyday, each time the strand shifted from the wind, its movement held in a new form of continuous fluctuation and radiating motion in fluid contortions. At night I would walk across the bridge or just stand there to listen to the long sustained tones of railway flanges weaving around one another forming a shrill, gossamer bloom or emanating solitarily in the distance. The anti-vacuum tubes of the train engines would string together short bursts of steam as constellations of repetition in a spatial and temporal field. For the brief point of time that the strand was there I would reflect on the presence of the audible form from the trains and inaudible form of the billowing tape, the closeness of both forms existing in the same place, bearing witness only as long as the tape remained connected to the power line and only as long as the sounds from the trains remained uncovered in the quiet night.

When walking out onto a frozen lake, I experienced the late winter sun setting in a cloudless sky, shining directly flush golden into my eyes; the light reflected off the vast surface of snow I was walking on, a blinding light from below me as well as above, extending to the horizon. The wind's visceral spectrum filled my ears with sound and enveloped my body. In this moment there was a closeness in total light and total sound which subsumed my senses, revealing in their absence (my gazing down, the wind lessening) the faintest wash of tiny ice crystals' accumulated collisions on the surface of the lake.

I stood in a greenhouse. Enclosing the structure were two layers of netting, above were cumulus clouds. The wind would blow the netting and the layers would separate from one another, then come together again. Both layers of mesh were of equal dimension and material, in their curving interstice a continuously transforming grid was superimposed on the passing clouds. Standing inside this structure and gazing up formed a manifold plane of variance in the motion of the netting and intersecting lines with the shapes and movement of the clouds.

I have always enjoyed floating in a body of water with my ears below the surface and eyes above.

- AL

Words sit on the page differently if they first existed as sound versus writing; they crystallize differently. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently in relation to scores, feeling a little suspicious of writing things down, and wanting to take a step back to review what happens when sound is transduced into image. I’ve gotten interested in orality studies because the relationship of literacy and orality seems to have a lot in common with the relationship of notated music and aurally-composed music.

In the 1930s, Milman Parry upended long-held assumptions about the past by demonstrating that the Homeric epics were not great works of literature, but rather great works of oral performance. It was a combination of the poetry’s prosody and pneumonics that caused the language to crystallize differently. In this kind of oral performance there is a distinctive kind of repetition, a repetition of stock names or phrases that assist both the listener and the performer. But in writing these kinds of repetitions are tedious, which is why many translators of the Iliad and Odyssey do away with them and alter the language to be more graceful in written form.

Homeric epic in the original Greek is rhythmic, set in the meter of dactylic hexameter: each line having six beats of long-short-short or long-long. The poets were probably very good at improvising this rhythmic speech three-thousand years ago; Herodotus wrote that when the Oracle at Delphi delivered her prophesies, she spoke in perfect dactylic hexameter. We know that poets and prophets back then could develop this skill, because these practices have persisted in various languages and meters through the millennia. In order to gain insight about ancient bardic practices, Milman Parry traveled to then-Yugoslavia in the 1930s with an early tape recorder to record bards who perform Serbo-Croatian epic poetry and accompany themselves with the gusle, a 1-string bowed instrument.

Shortly thereafter, Milman Parry shot himself in a hotel room in Los Angeles, quite possibly by accident. His student Albert Lord carried on the work, continuing to record Serbian bards into the 1950s, and in 1960 published The Singer of Tales in which he analyzed the performance practice of the oral poets. What Parry and Lord wanted to understand was how the form of the oral poetry was shaped by the absence of reading and writing because, while the bards could belong to any economic class, they all had one thing in common: they were illiterate. Yet, without knowing what a syllable is, they would still put the same number of syllables in every line of poetry just by knowing what feels right.

Avdo Mededović was considered to be one of the great bards of his generation, not for any exceptional vocal or instrumental abilities, but rather for his storytelling. A bard’s personal style, their unique way of providing the details of an archetypal story, is the measure of their skill. The same story can be told in 2000 lines or 6000 lines. The difference is in the poet’s embellishments, with each section of a poem being expandable or contractible, based on the needs of the circumstances and the whims of the performer. Here is a short video of Mededović performing with the gusle. There are also a handful of recordings by Mededović and others available on Harvard’s Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature. It is a hypnotic sound, hovering between music and language.

There are two recent pieces that I would like to share that were somehow inspired by the performance practice of epic poetry. The first one, Three studies for viola da gamba, led to the second, Four studies for viola d’amore. A few years back, prior to learning about Milman Parry and reading Albert Lord’s book, I had begun a practice of improvising repetitive sounds on the gamba for long periods of time, so long that I would lose my mind and stop really paying attention to what I was actually playing. Reaching that mental state felt like a point of arrival, a place where I could finally let my body establish its own patterns and start building up ideas based on those tendencies.

About 6 months later I came to learn about these bards and started to have a framework to understand the difference between sounds produced through memory recall vs. spontaneous formation. Over the years, bards develop their craft by gradually adding more and more material to their repertoire, repeating lines and learning to embellish them until the language is written into their bodies. While this bears some similarity to rote memorization, in terms of embodiment is a very different practice and sensation.

Similarly, both of these pieces for solo string instruments emerged gradually through a repetitive practice and, as much as is possible, without writing anything down. They sound generally the same from one performance to the next, even though much of the specific rhythmic, harmonic, melodic and timbral material is quite variable. I have been developing and performing Three studies for viola da gamba since October 2018. The first study is inspired by the early recordings of the bards captured on imperfect tape recorders, quiet and staticky and warped. The second study is also very quiet, hissy and tenuous. The third study repeats noisy 7 chords and then there is a coda.

Four studies for viola d’amore, developed in collaboration with Marco Fusi from November 2018 to March 2019, grew directly out of Three studies for viola da gamba as a first attempt to create a piece for another person that would, in a similar way, harness their own mindless inclinations and internal rhythms. Fusi was a perfect person to work with, being someone who researches collaborative relationships between composer and performer, and also just so happens to play a 7-string bowed instrument even more obscure than my own. The studies explore unique features of the viola d’amore, such as the sympathetic strings (which can also be plucked) or the shallowness of the bridge (which allows for the easy production of triple-stops and even quadruple or quintuple in the right situation).

There is no score for the gamba studies, but for the viola d’amore studies some things still needed to be written down due to the long-distance nature of the collaboration: a couple sketches along the way, and also a text score that was made after the fact. Even though these works weren’t created that differently from others, having a focused awareness of the process and a deliberate suspicion of notation feels like something new. I’ll keep at it for a while, writing nothing down or at least as little as possible, while still working to create mannered little pieces that feel very composed. It’s not that I don’t love writing and notation and paper, but things can be written down in the body as well, and sometimes the act of putting something on the page works in contrary, inadvertently taking the music out of the body more than intended.

- LS

It's an energy, it's the light, it's a fever. It could be a sound that's heard in our ears. Now that the boundary of sound has expanded beyond what it was in my childhood, the distinction between good and bad sounds is no longer important. It just exists on its own and is valued by someone to be meaningful. Wherever you are, whatever you do, you can hear the sound, and you can record the moment when you're listening. It's an element of sound that I define. Of course, that's not important or it might be important depending.

I don't know what I've been after. I chose an irreversible path but I think I'm back on track although I don't know exactly. It's circling but no one knows where it's going. We may be trapped in a fiction created by someone. If so, I'm sure I'll escape the room.

This song is a collection of parts that document the process of my escape. I'm still stuck in a lot of different things, and a lot of people have told me how to get out, but I'm struggling not to run away and leave this orbit in my own way.

I just want to say, I love my wife and two sons. Other words may not have been needed in the first place.

- JS