Jennifer Walshe - Aisteach
"The Avant-Garde Archive of Ireland. Aisteach (www.aisteach.org) is an archive of fictional histories that documents the development of experimental ideas and methods in Irish art, music, and literature."
A Brief Introduction to the Guinness Dadaists
The sounds make a statement, sometimes it sounds crazy with the backgrounds running on a parallel track, The expressive nature of the sounds was important to me but it is non-directional as if there is nothing to convey, reminded me of the gibberish style of theatre where a series of imaginative word sequences and sounds are used as dialogues, but most of them are expressions as per the narrative of the story. But in this piece the gibberish style doesn’t necessarily need to convey any meaning. The sounds in the background form a different dimension altogether, trying to find a way to explain it but the audience needs to listen to it over a period of time to derive different layers from this piece.
Ann Cleare - Dorchadas
The piece has a striking start, the stretching of space and time, like a big bang, then the whole piece has an exploration into the unknown space kind of emotion. Any travel into the unknown is filled with anxiety, fear, restlessness and apprehensions. The energy that is generated from or consumed by these raw emotions seems to be present in this piece. The travel converges into a monotonic sound and then again diverges into the previously created space, this is significant as energy. Energy is not constant. It transforms. The oscillating effect gives pendulum visual and an expected extrapolated sound that doesn’t happen but silence takes over and plays a role there. Silence and energy are very important here. The oscillation gives a feeling of prolonged introspection. It makes the listener part of the sound, as if I’m sitting at the centre of the circumference along which all the sound making equipments are placed. One phase transforms into another. Break and build. Reverb and equalisation seems to have played a crucial role (?). As John Cage had said in one of his interviews, the sounds here too do not have any responsibility to be real or be close to reality. The sound of it seems regenerative and dynamic. It can lead to other ideas and thoughts, that’s the beauty of it. Sounds metamorphosed into a time warped space where distortion comes into play.
Donnacha Dennehy - Grá agus Bás
When the piece starts, I find a striking similarity with a folk music form of Manipur (North East Indian state) called Khunung Eshei or Khullang Eshei.
Performance of Khunung Eshei : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arH9-gnVpf4
Some words on Khunung Eshei: http://kanglaonline.com/2013/03/seram-neken-arts-and-culture-khullang-eshei-manipurs-folk-treasure/
It was pointed out by A.R. Rahman (composer) in one of his TV shows that this Khunung Eshei form is very similar to the tonality and playing sound of a very old Armenian instrument Duduk
Duduk playing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw_0lE0G3NA
The sounds are oscillatory in nature at the beginning.. transformative in general, a dronish texture is always present in the background.. moving from one layer to another.. it’s like prayer, while thinking about the transformative nature of the piece, read an excerpt from one of the writings on this album, and it said the album was based on the themes of love, life and death. There are sound transformations throughout the piece, but the chord change at 6:24 is very striking and shows reflections of hope and light.
There is no drastic change in the main tune but the whole process undergoes massive transformations in different layers and also realms of the thought process
