Monograph (2021)
Monograph is a work for one present and at least eight absent performers. Performed live, but specifically designed to be experienced remotely, the perspective shifts from live onstage performance, to prerecorded video text readings and processed singing (deliberately designed to resemble Zoom) on a direct feed, to appropriated television clips.
The piece contains a diverse set of texts, from Icelandic sagas to medieval Islamic philosophy to 19th-century French newspaper filler, all directly or indirectly circling ideas of separation and coherence, death and continuity.
The musical material is derived from a folk-song genealogy, tracing a network of musical and thematic connections from an 18th-century ballad of a young man dying of syphilis, through the (Mexican!) cowboy classic ‘Streets of Laredo’ to the New Orleans blues ‘St. James Infirmary’. The spread and transformations of this lament across various cultures reflects the diversity yet universality of the spoken texts.
It is further punctuated by a series of short televised lessons on the physics of sound from the 1960s. I can’t explain it, but they needed to be there.
The absent performers in Monograph, spread from California to Iceland, are not only an unavoidable fact of the time the piece was created, but are also a reflection of the work’s themes of presence and absence, togetherness and separation. Not only are they missing from the physical space of performance (as is the audience), they are channels for the words of others: The texts are those of long-dead authors, and we are not hearing the voices of the singers themselves — their voices drive a synthesis algorithm that attempts to match their singing, moment by moment, to a corpus of sounds derived from original recordings of the songs. The recordings manipulated by myself are those of absent performers, separated not only by space, but time as well.
Monograph is a reflection through a shattered mirror of arbitrary outcomes and quotidian misfortune. The braiding together of its many disparate elements, tragic, comic at times, is itself a physics experiment: Driving these elements together under the pressure of a performance, what kind of chain reactions will occur?
The attached video comprises approximately the last eight minutes of the piece, which has a total duration of approximately one hour. The entire work can be found in full here , beginning at about 4:30.
MO: Composition and live performance.
Remote performers: Chris Cochrane, Freyr Gudmunsson, Kjartan Gudmunsson, Liz Hollander, David Linton, Julius Sumner Miller, Högna Thorkelsdottir, and Christina Wheeler.
Texts: The Saga of Burnt Njal, Kosmos (Witold Gombrowicz), Novels in Three Lines (Félix Feneon)
Negative Differential Resistance Nº 4 (2017)
Total duration 35′
The Grand Abacus (2016)
No More My Lord (2016)
3 (Out of 4) Possible States of Matter (2011)
The pot is filled with a block of ice, and is slowly heated until it boils.
Total duration 22′