music for war (2005)

for single performer

drums, keyboard, voice, synthesizer, sampler, sequencer

Much of my work implicates the performing body in a process of re-learning, of scrutinizing and adjusting its physical connections to the instrument and machine interface, in the context of loosely-structured improvisations or recording games. music for war takes up the same concerns but regiments them, proscribes the moves, spells out the physical choreography to which the performer is bound in order to realize the songs.

The body must confront the machines and instruments over time, learning new ways to manage the interface through which they are made to speak. The keyboard and machine-triggers become extensions of the drum kit or the drum kit and machine-triggers become extensions of the keyboard. Ideally the composer/performer is not “playing the keyboard and the drums at the same time”; the composer/performer is developing a vocabulary on a new instrument made of other instruments.

This project marked a change in the themes I was taking up and the level of transparency between these themes and my personal relationship to them. In brief, my younger brother, a corporal in the Marine Corps, left for his first combat deployment in Iraq in March of 2003. music for war encompasses the songs that refer to this, and to other related events, overtly.