Folding Space / Folding Time is a piece commissioned for GIOFest XV that encourages the orchestra and our guests to explore memory, community and stories through time and space.
Conceived in Tarraleah (on Palawa Country) in Tasmania, Australia September 14th-24th 2022, with Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and Australian Art Orchestra, Performed in Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow, November 30th 2022.
The work features archival recordings, graphic scores, video samples, and conduction gestures learned from theremin, telematic music making, and cross-cultural exchange.
Thanks to Creative Scotland, Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra and Australian Art Orchestra, I was honoured to join the Tarraleah Creative Music Intensive Tarraleah (on Palawa Country) - travelling to the other side of the world to play with 30 musicians, 650m above sea level in the Tasmanian Highlands, for 10 days.
It was the first time I had seen a truly dark, moonless sky - the milky way became visible as my eyes adjusted, and I saw shooting stars seem to break the laws of spacetime as they dropped through the atmosphere to the horizon in an instant.
Poles apart, I discovered a housemate who was my twin - the same age, same instrument - in the past, we had even made the same graphic scores with optical prisms, to refract light into a colour spectrum.
We shared a chopping board as we shared stories, cooking together in our kitchen.
At AAO CMI, we learned:
• how to extend the voice as Bae Il Dong, a Korean Pansori singer explained how we could find analogues of the breath in astronomy;
• Chris Hale taught us to clap without moving our hands, as he progressively taught iterations of Korean Ho-Hup gestures;
• Daniel and David Wilfred, from Ngukurr, in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territories, generously wrote us into their song cycle - we heard Daniel sing in his voice, his father's voice and his son's voice, a song that passes on intimate knowledge of his country; while David directed us to move with his didgeridoo.
• Aviva Endean led us on a sound walk through dense forests and a huge valley drop; where the lyre bird and Peter Knight's trumpet fused and diffracted through dense mist.
10 days sharing a physical musical space (and home) with a community who are usually asleep as I wake, with no screens, no internet, no other people.
This followed 2 years of playing with our global community through ZOOM every week, where our digital selves congregated in a simulated musical space - a telematic music making across timezones.
10 days of learning how to play music with the whole body; not just my hands.
10 days of learning to play music using memory and story; not just spontaneous impulse in the present.
This followed 2 years of playing the theremin, where the body conjures unfamiliar synthesised timbres without touch.
Further performances include The Living Land Film Festival at University of Central Asia in Kyrgyztan, a performance from the Frost Electroacoustic Ensemble in Miami, Florida.
