2. Tee Ta Boo
3. Crying At The Lake
4. Spectre
5. Destination Black Hole
6. Standing Still
The original musical material for Contact came about from a spectral analysis of some electric guitar distortions I made in 1997. The open strings of the guitar A and E were played through a distortion pedal and the harmonics/overtones produced were measured and recorded. This then produced a pitch stream which is used throughout the work.
The contact of the title comes from, on one level, the colliding, in a Varesian sense, of these notes A and E and what this musical encounter signifies in everyday terms; a meeting of people, objects etc. The harmonics/ overtones produced from this are the results of this physical interaction (the outcome of a conversation or actions) and, over the course of the work, a series of these forms a real time relationship.
Just as in our lives, the outcome is somewhat predetermined by particular inherent qualities (A=440 etc) but altered by circumstance or outside influenece (distortion). We, just as sound, have our own fundamentals and frequencies that we operate at, and at all times our harmonics/ overtones (our 'auras') are interacting with our environment.
The movement titles are taken from paintings by the Texan outsider artist Valton Tyler. Often, an outsider artists only 'artistic' contact is with themselves; their work is sometimes never shown to anyone, only to be discovered later, perhaps after their death (as is the case with Laure Pigeon, a French visionary artist). The contact of the outsider artist with the wider commercial art world is one which is very precarious; the risk of ridicule is great.
My own contact with Valton Tyler is purely through the paintings, but I have let his work determine the programmatic of each of the movements.
Contact-Cuttings was premiered by Ensamble Rosario in Argentina in 2002.
Contact-Cuttings (Mvt 3 - Crying at the Lake)