The Weirding Module – HYPERCHORUS

"Theoretically, a hyper-chorus could sing material of this type but, perhaps fortunately, such a choir does not yet exist." Alessandro Bosetti, liner notes to Plane / Talea #31-34.

Grappling with the provocation of Bosetti's HYPERCHORUS this edition presents impossible choirs, computational theatre, pharmacological radio, human loops and deep affectionate listening with five long-form works of new music over 90 minutes.

Annea Lockwood – For Ruth

Annea Lockwood’s 2021 piece For Ruth is a re-working of her long-time partner Ruther Anderson’s 1974 work “conversations”. The initial piece is a study of secretly recorded chats between the two lovers while Anderson was away on a residency in Hancock, New Hampshire, in it, most of the actual conversation is removed and short simple affection filled words, sighs and laughter remain. It’s a study on how close listening builds affection initially made as a private gift for lockwood. Lockwood’s reworking of the piece adds field recordings from the site of Anderson’s residency and long sustained tones that add a poignancy to the original work now recontextualised not just by Lockwood’s interventions but also by Anderson’s passing in 2019.

Ellen Zweig – If Archimedes

By 1980, Zweig had perfected a technique she named the “human loop”, directing multiple performers to repeat a single poetic phrase over and over as they recorded to tape. Inevitably, the loops phase in and out of synchronisation over time, creating a sonic collage of drifting, rippling syllabic waves that rise and fall with natural tides. The text becomes performance, and in turn it becomes dreamily and hypnotically abstracted from the written word. I think I recognise the voice of George Oppen one of my favourite poets here.

Alessandro Bosetti – Plane/Talea II

The cycle of compositions collected under the title Plane/Talea reflect my interest in vocal polyphonic music. They envision an “impossible choir” constructed through the sampling of thousands of fragments and pieces of voices, my own and those of others, and their recomposition into polyphonic garlands and textures. This cycle can be intended as the utopic sonification of an impossible community in which the voice is atomized into primary particles and later reconstituted into sonic masses and clouds. These are too dense and complex for a chorus of real human beings to sing. The music of Plane/Talea is the sonic projection of such a community. The voice is not processed or altered in any way but subjected to molecular reorganization. Theoretically, a hyper-chorus could sing material of this type but, perhaps fortunately, such a choir does not yet exist. – Alessandro Bosetti, from the liner notes of Plane / Talea

Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern) – After Words

There’s a common myth that data is mined, like coal or oil. In this way of thinking data is an untapped natural resource, the foundation for a new industrial revolution led by the likes of Amazon and Google.

But that’s not right. Data isn’t mined, it’s made. Sometimes data sets are literally produced by actors performing for researchers and their machines. Other times, data sets are the product of our own performances, every time we wake up Alexa, or upload a video to YouTube.

After Words is about these performances which we’ve been thinking of as a kind of computational theatre. The piece is about how we speak to and perform for machine listening systems and about what’s happening to language as a result.

Most of the sounds and many of the voices in After Words come from existing data sets. The script was written with and against an autoregressive language model trained on a data set with 175 billion parameters, and it was performed by voice actors, all of whom work in critical data studies. The result is a strange set of semi-fictional tales of computational scripting, instruction, production and performance staged at ACCA in eight channel audio. In its more pessimistic, or maybe realistic moments, the work gestures at a near future in which language has been fully operationalised where every word we speak, has a computational effect and residue

Arturas Bumšteinas – Radio Pharma

In year 2018 Lithuanian sound artist Arturas Bumšteinas turned Vilnius‘ „Sodų4“ gallery space into a recording studio for volunteers to visit and freely vocalize the names of their pharmaceuticals of choice. Most of the participants sang the generic names of active substances of their medication and the variety of remedies appeared to be very wide – from prescription drugs to homeopathic and natural plant medicine. There were no instructions given on how and what to sing, the only proposal was – “sing the name(s) of your medication” These were then mixed together into the following piece for radio titled – Radio Pharma.