Music composition and performance, initial image/software: James Rouvelle Video: Lili Maya
James wrote some software that generates static images from keyboard interaction that he thought worked with the music. Lili worked with the software to generate images that she used/edited as she composed the video.
This music is derived from a 10 note scale inspired by the work of Ervin Wilson.
These videos were presented on the BBC/Tectonics website between May 8 and June 7, 2021.
From the Festival catalogue: For Tectonics 2021, Close Scrape debuts “Cutout [6×6]”, a modular piece structured as a constellation of six semi-independent movements that can be performed or listened to in any order. Well-suited to the task at hand, Close Scrape snips fragmentary excerpts of live performance and obsolete recordings, isolates them from their original connections, and – in punctuated transmissions – stitches them together with tailor-made sources of obscure origin. The piece is governed by the guiding idea that music can function as a living artifact, intermediating between channelled worlds and audience receptions.
The online incarnation of “Cutout (6×6)”, streamed from May 8 to June 7, 2021 on the BBC/Tectonics website, includes new video art commissioned for the festival by Maya + Rouvelle, a collaboration between Lili Maya and James Rouvelle that began in 2009 in New York.
Below are four excerpts from the maya+rouvelle live-stream project with Ekmeles that included Karlheinz Stockhausen’s In the Sky I Am Walking (1972). The full performance and additional information/writing about the project can be found here.
We created visual art/video/titling/staging elements for this special event, streamed live from the singers’ home in Brooklyn, NY.
LOVE SONG (Nootka)
No matter how hard I try
to forget you,
you always
come back to my mind,
and when you hear me singing you may know
I am weeping for you.
PLAINT AGAINST THE FOG (Nootka)
Don’t you ever,
You up in the sky,
Don’t you ever get tired
Of having the clouds between you and us?
PERUVIAN DANCE SONG (Ayacucho)
Wake up, woman,
Rise up, woman,
In the middle of the street,
A dog howls.
May the death arrive
May the dance arrive
Comes the dance
You must dance,
Comes the death
You can’t help it!
Ah! what a chill,
Ah! what a wind….
SONG OF A MAN WHO RECEIVED A VISION (Teton Sioux)
Friends, behold!
Sacred I have been made.
Friends, behold!
In a sacred manner
I have been influenced
At the gathering of the clouds.
Sacred I have been made,
Friends, behold!
Sacred I have been made.