Output details

‘Memory Machine’ - multichannel electroacoustic work. Commissioned by the Inventionen Festival Berlin with the support of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm and the Technische Universität Berlin (DAAD Edgard-Varèse-Gastprofessur residency Winter Semester 2009-10). Premiere Inventionen Festival Berlin July 27th 2010. Further performances: Aberdeen, Leicester, São Paulo, Taiwan, Vienna.

Memory Machine was the research outcome of my DAAD Edgard-Varèse-Gastprofessur residency at Technische Universität Berlin (2009-2010). Commissioned by the Inventionen Festival Berlin with the support of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the first version was created for the 3-dimensional ‘wave field synthesis’ system at the TU. It may now be performed in 8 or 5 channel versions. It had specific research aims:

(1) The work seeks to explore the boundary between concert work and installation. Each twelve minute cycle has a basic form that remains the same and may be performed in concert (once or twice - separated) or run continuously as an installation, ideally for at least five repetitions. At the first performance which lasted an hour, it ran in a concert hall with the audience free to come and go.

(2) It continues a strand of practice-based research into memory and its relationship to space – real and imaginary – which has extended over my entire creative output. It is in part inspired by renaissance ideas of mapping objects of memory onto an imaginary stage as examined in Frances Yates’s The Art of Memory (1966). In some of these ‘memory theatres’ (those of Robert Fludd, for example) there are five doors which act as ‘loci’ for the placing of memories. This is a starting point for the form and spatialisation of sound.

(3) Memory was the first kind of ‘recording’. The work seeks to explore its technological mediation: there are layers, crossfades, unlikely combinations, distortions of time, interruptions, unexpected triggers etc.. It will rarely be heard the same twice – a Max patch remixes the sound materials differently in each cycle. Sound materials include soundscapes I have recorded over the past 35 years and ‘memory fragments’ of music which has some significance to me, frozen or very slow moving.