Events

Much, if not almost all of Huntsville and Dans les arbres' music is continuous. It seems like there is very little room for shorter, isolated events of sounds. Why? Perhaps it has to do with cohesion? And that shorter events, in the moment of performance, seem to contradict the building of a cohesive piece of music?

It should not be too hard to combine, though.

I made some studies. Experiments. Almost negating the ensemble music. I created my own isolated musical events, made out of several recordings of separate sounds. I experimented changing the envelope of the events, changing the decay, replacing the beginning, moving the peak, etcetera. These studies informed and inspired the preparations of the ‘Electronic Mirror’.

These small pieces are also cohesive. Isn’t that correct?
And continuum comes out of the repetition,
and the variation in the repetitions.
So, why don’t we do this when we play collectively?

Perhaps it has to do with trust and responsibility – the notion that it is harder to contribute inaudibly than audibly; that our work ethics and the building of our continuums do not easily allow pauses, silence and isolated events?

Usage

1. Dans les arbres, cut up and re-organized into isolated musical events: (01:03)

2. Events study, made out of a multi-track guitar recording: (01:49)

3. Banjo events experiment. Appears in various versions of the Video Ensemble:

4. Early version of Video Ensemble with isolated musical events. From a concert at Norwegian Academy of Music, December 2013: