Here’s an excerpt of a new work provisionally called Uexküll Études. I might also end up calling it Lem, I haven’t quite decided yet. Both men have wonderfully evocative surnames to name pieces after! Also the strange new worlds that they presented us with were obviously not that dissimilar, and the excitement I get from the works of both is much the same.
The final piece will be in four movements, which I’ve almost completed, and it’s looking like about 35 minutes altogether. This is the fourth movement. The pitch material was composed quite quickly over just two days. It was very fluid and improvisational, and was done by recursively using just a few simple processing techniques of one shortish sound file. The end result turned out surprisingly rich and orchestral. To this I added some processed speculative bioacoustics, which function a little like a soloist to the orchestral textures. So it’s a concerto of sorts.
I’ll be making a visual accompaniment to this as soon as I can find a snail or two. For now the above image is of a member of the Grimpoteuthis genus of octopus, otherwise known as the Umbrella octupus, also known, even less auspiciously, as the Dumbo octopus.
What’s in a name? More on this soon…