wastelands
(2023)
for tenor saxophone, percussion, piano/keyboard, electronics and optional lights
Program notes
"He fumbled his canteen off his shoulder with his claw hand and shook it. The canteen was nearly empty. Didn’t matter. He would drink every single drop and lay up here until the sun went down, and then he would walk down the highway and into Cibola, fabled City, Seven-in-One. Tonight he would drink from ever-springing fountains faced in gold. But not until the killer sun went down. God was the greatest firebug of them all. A long time ago a boy named Donald Merwin Elbert had burned up old lady Semple’s pension check. That same boy had torched the Methodist Church in Powtanville, and if there had been anything left of Donald Merwin Elbert in this shell, it had surely been cremated with the oiltanks in Gary, Indiana. Over nine dozen of them, and they had gone up like a walloping string of firecrackers. Just in time for the Fourth of July, too. Nice. And in the wake of that conflagration, only the Trashcan Man had been left, his left arm a cracked and boiling stew, a fire inside his body that was never going to go out... at least not until his body was so much blackened charcoal.
And tonight he would drink the water of Cibola, yes, and it would taste like wine."
Taking loose inspiration from Stephen King’s post-apocalyptic epic The Stand (1990), the work sets the ensemble into a synthetic and erratic environment of sound and light, depicting the struggle of the performers to ‘sing’ through their instruments and find new ways of expression to transgress their desolate surroundings.
Bringing together the human and the artificial, the synthetic and the organic, the work presents a combination of live instrumental performance, electronics, light design and AI-generated sonic content (obtained from the neural network PRiSM SampleRNN) as an exploration of newfound ways of expression amidst an imagined posthuman landscape.
Commissioned by Ex-Sentia Ensemble, with generous support from the Fondation Nicati-de Luze and guidance from the PRiSM team at the Royal Northern College of Music
Duration: c. 15'
Instrumentation
Tenor saxophone
Percussion
Large tom-tom
Spring coil (medium size)
Spring drum
Hi-hat 1 (china + regular cymbal)
Hi-hat 2 (2 small-sized cymbals)
Kalimba (ideally loosely tuned around the E-flat minor scale)
MIDI pad (with 8 pads)
Piano & MIDI keyboard (4 octaves)
Performances
19.10.2023 – METABIOME, Ackemannshof (Basel, CH)
20.10.2023 – METABIOME, Centre Le Phénix (Fribourg, CH)
14.11.2023 – METABIOME, Theater Pavillon (Lucerne, CH)
15.11.2023 – METABIOME, PROGR (Bern, CH)
Performers: Ex-Sentia Ensemble (Miguel Fernández, Santiago Villar, Jacob Mason)