COMPOSES
Infiltrationen (Memory Space #4)
- duration:20'-25'
- year:2009
- instrumentation:4 electric guitars & live-electronics
- commissioned by:ZWERM
- dedicated to:My dear friends of Zwerm and to Jacques Tati
- Recording: Sub Rosa portrait cd "Fremdkörper"
Program notes
In Not I, for electric-guitar and live-electronics (2007), I constructed a dynamical musical environment in which the gesticulations of the guitarplayer are being “distorted” in several gradations by the live-electronics. When, two years after having written Not I, the exciting new e-guitarquartet “Zwerm” asked me to write a new piece for them, I wanted to take this deconstruction yet one step further. In "Infiltrationen" the guitar is considered as a horizontal open circuit of 6 strings, an acoustical work-bench on which the guitarists can perform their actions using all kinds of objects. This “tradition” of “table-top-guitarism” has gained importance since such musicians as Keith Rowe and Fred Frith started their guitar-experiments in the seventies, and it served as a starting point for this composition.
In "Infiltrationen" there are three layers of musical material that infiltrate eachother continuously: the actions performed by the guitarists, the prerecorded 4-channel tape (generated using analogue mixing-table feedback-techniques in which several signals infiltrate eachother) and a live-electronics part performed on a homemade digital instrument by a fifth musician.
“Infiltrations” are even more present on another level: the infiltrations of technology and technology-based decisionmaking on human (inter)action and vice versa – a subject that is very important to me, not only in a musical context. In Infiltrationen the “score” is being generated in real-time on computerscreens – every performer has a laptop in front of him. Whenever a performer wants a new playing-instruction he hits the spacebar of his laptop, and since the computers are connected to eachother through a network, the change made on one computer immediately has consequences for the playing instructions on all the other computers. Although a clear musical evolution has been preprogrammed in these playing-instructions on a macro-temporal level, the performers (almost) never know in advance what will be the next instruction. This makes the musicians masters and servants of the technology at the same time.
"Infiltrationen (Memory Space #4)" is warmly dedicated to my friends of Zwerm ... and to Jacques Tati.
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ZWERM & Stefan Prins performing "Infiltrationen (Memory Space #4)" at Concertgebouw Brugge during it's première (excerpts), 24/11/2009.
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One possible (very fast) version of the real-time generated computer-score of "Infiltrationen"
ZWERM performing Infiltrationen at the Concertgebouw Brugge during the première