CD
Recorded in Berlin, September and October 2022.
Premiered October 27th, 2022 at the Friedman Gallery as part of the Distant Pairs curated by Issue Project Room.
Originally presented as a quadraphonic fixed media piece.
Designed by Philip Marshall. Covert artwork by Owen Schuh.
Indifferent Rocks Are Rearranged into a Dam takes various - and
sometimes competing - understandings of “Interval”, “isolation” and
“distance” as its point of conceptual and compositional departure.
Taking its title from a line in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain,
Indifferent Rocks… explores different forms of detachment and
abstraction present both in the piece’s making, as well as the
post-pandemic cultural environment in which it was composed. We were
interested in the perceptual limit of comprehending distances both
social and musical: between speakers in a room; between partials;
between attacks and isolated electronic tones; between virtuosity and
fixed media; between performance separated by an ocean to its
playback.
The tonal breadth of Lucy’s cello spectra was analyzed and digitally
resynthesized as a collection of partials. For the initial analysis
process, cello passages of quick fluctuating pitch were chosen. We
wanted to break down and approach the sonorous materiality of the
cello as a non-musical object.
By breaking down the cello into indifferent materials -only to then
rearrange and mimic its musical gestures, we wanted to see how meaning
can be divested and then reimbued, with an ear to questioning that
precise process of “reconstruction” of meaning: just as rocks are
indifferent to containing and holding water “for us” until they have
been placed into the configuration of a dam.
By focusing on the minutiae of the sound - “zooming in” - the spectral
gaze renders the cello as raw inharmonic material. From these
collected pitch sets, the distance between each frequency was
calculated to construct a harmonic system by which sound was
synthesized. At that point, what form could be given to arrange these
static tones, to give them life: does that life require
re-approximating the sound of its source, a kind of mimicry of cello
as an “authentic” source, or is there another kind of life that can be
wrenched from these soundings? In oscillating between these two poles
we hoped to reframe the listeners’ relationship with a pitched
instrument. We wanted to tease the boundaries through which the cello
becomes experienced. The simplified synthetic tones, intervallically
arranged against Lucy’s cello parts are the means by which the
distance between cello, synthesis, and sonic meaning are ascribed
significance.
Since we were already preoccupied with the uncanny distances between
source and output, original and resynthesized mimic - the reductions
and slips required in bridging that distance - we felt it suitable to
document the multi-channel piece via a simple recording of the
abstracted aural gaze of others. Four speakers become two ears, a
multi-channel field is reduced to stereo and multiple perceiving
bodies in the Fridman Gallery are now simply the backs of heads,
watched by two eyes on a screen.
