I’ve begun sketching ideas for a new work for piano, synthesisers and computer. I’ve spent the Summer thinking a lot about animals and aesthetics and going through the enormous amount of recordings in Berlin Natural History Museum’s Animal Sound Archive. The question is how to integrate all this research into a written composition. One clear thing I wanted to avoid was in some way imitating animal sounds. In a sense I wanted to keep the animal research and the compositional activity totally separate, but extremely close together, so that they influence each other subtley by just being around each other. Now that I think about it, it’s basically ring modulating research and praxis.
My current idea for this new piece is for the psychedelic onto-aesthetic bio-acoustic angle to be evoked by the Lyra 8, modulated by this tiny but powerful mini modular synth the Bastl Kastle. The Kastle sends control voltage to modulate the Lyra 8 (which is already modulating the heck out of itself in all sorts of esoteric ways) and they combine to make an active, unruly, intensely textural racket. I’d like to include this extremely quietly behind the piano, and maybe cross modulate the live piano with the synths too. The Lyra is played via these pairs of contacts instead of keys. When the performer touches both sensors, his/her body acts as a conductor, completing the circuit. Apparently cheese works well as a conductor on these Lyras too, and I’m wondering if it would be possible to cultivate some mushrooms to grow over the contacts. Are mushrooms conductive?
Anyway, here’s a quick example of what the synths sound like together.
As for the piano part, it will be very much non-narrative / static in terms of temporal flow, hopefully expressing in some way the weird animal inscrutability I’ve been exploring in this blog. The word static is little a misleading and a bit overused… temporally expansive maybe? I’m planning on using ring modulation to create these beautiful Gamelan type sonorities, and add harmonic and timbral unpredictability to the instrument. I’m really into the simplicity and symmetry of ring modulation, there’s something very interesting about the idea of sidebands reflecting each other around a carrier signal that isn’t there (or is present in a negative modality).