Crawl Space

An invitation from this venue for experimental music based in The Hague Netherlands for a performance was humbly yet warmly embraced. I took it as an occasion to try out an idea that had originated from working on an eight channel fixed media piece that I had made half a year earlier and that was presented at the Willem Twee Toonzaal in Den Bosch, during a Sonology presentation.

The fixedness of this work, although necessary to create a certain result, came across as something quite arbitrary. The piece could have worked equally fine with material presented in any other order. The sound material consisted mostly of multichannel output from various non-standard and dynamic stochastic synthesis models and invited for finding combinations other than those presented in the fixed version. As a side note, I had made this work with Xenakis’ La Légende d’Eer in the back of my mind. During the performance, I challenged myself to touch both the quietest, almost inaudible, and the overwhelmingly loud, without becoming harmful.

For the Crawl Space performance I created in Max, using Mira, an interface that would let me start or stop sound tracks and adjust their levels. And I would simply be mixing this material live, sort of as a deejay. In addition to this, I dug up an electronic instrument I had created more than a decade before which mixed well with the non-standard character of the other materials. This instrument was loosely inspired by work done by Angel Faraldo while he did his masters at Sonology.

When seeing the announcement—reading the names of former Sonology students that I hadn’t seen in a while made me happy and proud—it was clear I should do something with ants; animals I could readily relate to, among other through Langton’s Ant. The video playing here was what I created for this event—although this version plays ten times the original speed. This video created the timeline for the work. To end the piece, I invited the audience to join with a web audio application, in the spirit of One Hundred Loudspeakers, created for this occasion. (If the video doesn't run, refresh this page.)