Slides-zen-Dives

The idea of this piece took shape when Kate Carr asked me on Facebook if I was interested in performing as part of an electronic music event that she was curating at IKLECTIK Art Lab in London. I have known Kate in person since 2016. I first found out about her involvement with EEMSI following the release of Birds of a Feather; an album by the Sanandaj-based field recordist and sound artist Porya Hatami and the Toronto-based producer and sound artist Michael Trommer. It was released through Kate’s own record label, Flaming Pines, in 2012.

The set developed, spontaneously and organically, as a series of drone parts and a percussive passage. The sonic output can be described in terms of constantly moving clusters of electronically-generated glissandi of different kinds that interweave and complement each other while heading towards nowhere specific. To add more layers of ‘liveness’, two contact microphones were used on my modular system’s case during the show, which allowed me to amplify, further process, and play with the often undesired and supressed ‘noises’ resulting from physical contact between various parts of the system and my hands. These can be heard at the beginning of the recording as I start patching, for instance between 00:34 and 02:58, and towards the end as I begin unpatching to restore the system to its initial state, for instance between 13:27 and 15:10. I wanted to start the set with no prepatching, to return to a similar state in the end and, as such, to begin and end with the ‘noise’ of the ‘background’ and the patching process, while integrating, instead of trying to eliminate or supress, the usually unwanted sounds of the environment and of the performance ecosystem.