Work
when where
for piano trio and live electronics
Films, Audio & Samples
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About
A continuation of a series of works for piano trio (beginning with who [2015]), when where is based on a short story by New Zealand writer C. K. Stead, titled The Name on the Door is Not Mine. The text deals with ideas of displacement, isolation, and intrinsic-extrinsic disjunction, with the protagonist moving overseas to undertake a residency, and finding loneliness in his new home - a large city - in a university department that has no space for him.
when where, for piano trio and electronics, takes these concepts both literally and metaphorically. The instrumentalists perform a fixed score, with each part being recorded into a buffer. The electronics dynamically improvise with the performers, re-constituting phrases out of pieces of others, forming new phrases out of smaller gestures. This allows meta-trios to be created through the performance of the piece, whereby the performers interact with abstracted past versions of themselves, bringing about a verticalization of time through the concurrence of present and past statements.
Spatially and visually, this creates a disjunct between the real and the imagined, with live performer being in synchrony with earlier performances, and thus asynchronous with the other live performers. Following the current theme in my work emphasising materiality and gesture in performance, this disjunct alludes to a dislocation of time and place, and highlights mitigating aspects of gesture in performance, whereby the gesture is used to separate the individual performer from the ensemble.