Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Canterbury Christ Church University
Good Teeth – Ghikas & Walshe (2013) vinyl and digital album on Migro Records (MIG 002). Performers: Panos Ghikas (violin, viola, e-drums, drums), Jennifer Walshe (voice, trumpet, e-drums).
Good Teeth comprises of seven pieces that propose a new approach to interactive music making, by reconfiguring improvised material and subjecting it to compositional processes. Each piece contains layers of duets that integrate real-time actions with non-real-time processing through the use of recording, interfacing and gestural transformation.
Through Good Teeth, Ghikas and Walshe attempt to challenge the language of real-time musical interaction by exploring the dynamic field between composition and improvisation. The continuity of physical performance is interrupted by compositional modes of temporality, thus questioning the relationship between in-the-moment gestural expression and out-of-time sequential determinism, in a three-stage process:
The first stage involves the recording of free improvisations, their evaluation as sampled gestural material and further processing within the context of a system of classifiable characteristics.
During the second stage gestural material is converted into usable sample groupings, which are then projected through the use of software onto the layout of an e-drum kit. The resulting meta-instrument transforms the manner in which the gestural material is pronounced and conveyed in time. A multiplicity of velocities, envelopes and textural layers become organically available to the performer in a layout that has the physicality of a drum kit. This incites a different type of physical triggering of sounds to the original bodily gestures that produced them.
In the third stage the new improvised sessions explore how effectively the voice or acoustic instrument can communicate with the new interface.
The final recordings offer the potential for a new gestural syntax to both the performer and the audience by blurring temporal perception and “weaving together sound poetry with non-idiomatic improv” (The Wire #357). The meta-instrument creates new possibilities by reconfiguring physical memory for the improviser, who can now traverse time through a matrix of sonic events.
