Sound Design
Parson’s manipulation of Graham’s work through character transposition, retrograde, and copious speed shifts inspired me to create a stochastic score for sampler, drums and guitars (improvised and performed by Kid Millions and Zach Lehrhoff and myself). Mainly I wanted to get into a studio again. My child was on the verge of being born at the time, and there was enough money in the commissioning budget to rent a space and pay two brahs for a half-day of recording time. We went to seizure's palace, the ripshit Gowanus studio run by Jason LaFarge where SWANS recorded, https://seizurespalacerecording.com. It's also shared with Martin Bisi www.bcstudiobk.com. Oddly enough, it turned out the engineer's dad Timothy LaFarge was a Merce Cunningham dancer back in the day.
I had just read Stockhausen On Music, a transcribed series of lectures that describe his approach to score-making and, since I never had much success in my college-era composition classes, figured I'd revisit the vibe. Following a set of verbal instructions based solely on the new tempo of Martha Graham material learned by the company from the 194X documentation footage, the musicians improvised to the sound of record noise, Beach Boys b-sides, and verbal descriptions of imagery.
The resulting 26-minute jam, "Score for 'i used to love you'" is reassembled and layered over synth improvs and the original record noise recordings.
This frenetic basher which recurs throughout the piece is surrounded by found sound fragments which accompany the vignettes in the show between father/mother/daughter/lover and the appearances of the Fates. I was particularly taken by Graham’s sense of humor, something that I feel is usually eclipsed by the clenching emotional quality of her performers and the virtuosity of the dancing. Annie-B and I had frequent conversations about pursuing a dramatic bathos, or jumps from the sublime to the trivial, and this score’s use of alternating severe and ridiculous music was our first attempt at trying to push into that convention formally.
