Flight of the Swallows

from DMARC by Alan Gleeson

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Developed for a dance piece by Katarzyna Voetter.

Although the piece was based on the techniques of Music Concrète it also references the Futurists, especially Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) “… the muttering of motors that breathe and pulse with an undeniable animality, the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of power saws, the starting of a street car on the tracks…” wondering why cannot music embrace the sounds of nature,the sounds of a modern industrial society. In my piece I tried to have the mechanical sounds emulate nature or having an organic motion and the organic sounds to have a mechanical quality. Sometimes in real life this can actually happen, whereby the sounds of nature are replaced by a mechanical counterpart. In this sound world there are objects of great size and imprint and also micro sounds of great subtlety. With this in mind some sounds emulated animal movements, some sounds were animal movement, other sounds where a fusing of the two, and some natural sounds where given a industrial texture. Any characteristic in the sound that emulated or suggested they were alive I attempted to emphasize, some sounds did this naturally as in the “breathing” of refrigerator condensers, other sounds had to be layered and processed to achieve this. The dancers’ movement for the most part is subtle, but in this subtlety there is also a lot of tension, which I attempted to emulate by juxtaposing almost near silences with explosive attacks. Some of the dancers’ movements imitated cogs and motors and other mechanical movement, I tried not to be to direct with the mechanical noises, more trying to let the sound and movement suggest that for you. Obviously though in certain parts this is less subtle than others but I feel this is ok as there in the theme, a body as machine. Not designed to be unsettling the abrupt starts and stops also serve to suggest this could be a machine generated landscape, but also that this machines are alive.

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from DMARC, released August 4, 2016
Alan Gleeson, Katarzyna Voetter

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