SUAL Archives | 2011
Wysozky & Arden Day: Musical Banks — electro-acoustic composition
Duration: 11‘53“
Type: Source recording provided by the artists
Notes: Presented in conjunction with the shut up and listen! Award 2011
Musical Banks
prepared piano, electronic bow & computer (ft. tape sample by Luc Ferrari) recitative from Samuel Butler’s novel EREWHON
We started this piece by devising an analogy between what appears to us to be two opposite ways of confiscating time: music and money. Our attention was drawn towards a sample – or acoustic snapshot -from the French composer Luc Ferrari that he identified as money machine and within this disruptive process came the necessity to link the dystopia Erewhon written by Samuel Butler in the late 19th century. We focused on the controversial chapter named Musical Banks – after which we titled our piece – where Butler describes how money or currencies are reminders of our bygone relationship with gods, as an anthropologist would do; money is not only a commodity void of sacredness – if not a straightforward profanation – but a paradoxical artefact whose sole purpose is to minimalise emotions within human interactions. If this were the case then one could consider music as a social act to be the strict opposite of money which is chiefly an antisocial commodity.
[Wysozky & Arden Day]
Wysozky
Wysozky lives in Paris and Vienna and writes electro-acoustic pieces based on sonic microstructures and subtle atmospherics. In his live work he collaborates with musicians and sound artists, and explores fields of symbiosis of computers and acoustic and electric instruments. Visuals are a crucial component of his live performances. As a composer and live performer, he cooperates with modern dancers and theatre artists in his search for junction points of modes of human expression. Wysozky’s music is a universe, naïve and rich in contrast, seen through the eyes of a child. It is a world, gentle and cruel, inhabited by lovers and mourners, resounding with eerie melodies and roar of machines.