Turner Piece / Apartment House (Building Stories) / Metro (2015)
The Apartment House ensemble, directed by Anton Lukoszevieze, in collaboration with Sound And Music‘s ‘Embedded’ scheme, commissioned me for new works for strings and mezzo-soprano Lore Lixenberg resulting in the triptych ‘Turner Piece’.
For these works I divided the string sextet into a Left and Right, stereo, sub-ensemble to be placed in a large space, reflecting the time I spent in redundant office blocks in the past and the wide landscape that surrounds me in the now.
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‘Turner Piece’
is about vast natural landscapes and their micro textures. Impressionistic distant views one can find in paintings by Turner, with a few miniature details. The waving of a reed bed with the tiny rustling of dried flower heads. These sonic details are generated by the rustling paper sounds of turning the pages of the score.
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‘Apartment House (Building Stories)’
looking up the face of a tall white tower block, majestically resonating in the sunshine and in your mind. Watching its details: corners, windows, lintels, dry riser inlet, brick, plaster, brick. Going into the shiny new building, new future in gloss and marble. Flowers, charging buzz, cozy curtains, sofa, bed, table …….and half a bin bag*. That’s how I know these buildings. In their future. Redundant. Moldy, leaking, cold, dark. Uncomfortable. Unhappy. Up the out of date inspected elevator to the top. Up on the fire escape. To the very top. To breath. Breath in and breath out. Have a view of the world.
*the rules for squatting a place in the Netherlands was that there should be a bed, table with chair and half a bin bag present.
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‘Metro’
sitting in a full carriage in the London underground at rush hour. No one speaks. People are reading their free newspaper. This setting is the inspiration of working with paper page turning. Its wonderful fluttering sound in the abstract geometrical phasing in and out sounds of the metro. Some read casually, some are absorbed. Some take sensational stories to heart, some don’t. All in the rectangular space of the underground rhythms.
Darren Michael made this great video of the concert. Music recorded by James Dunn, Cafe Oto, mixed and mastered by Jobina Tinnemans.
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