transmission

The point of departure for transmission for electric guitar and live electronics is a system of composed (physical) movements across the guitar, which generate changing harmonic fields. This «fabric» is used to produce the notated materials, by diverse means of derivation, and also to produce the electronic sound-materials used in the second, fourth and sixth sections, which are derived from a recording of this «fabric» in the form of an uninflected stream of notes. The processes by which this material (that is, the processes of «transmission» of some kind of hypothetical «message») continue during live performance -- the compositional process by means of improvisational playing which emerges from «lacunae» in the fourth section, and the electronic process by means of live transformations of the guitar sound throughout.

The original «fabric» underlies the entire work (and other elements of DARK MATTER also) as if it were a deep archaeological stratum, whose transmission to the surface of the music proceeds through distortions, elucidations, irreparable losses and speculative reconstructions, and so forth. Thus, transmission belongs among those of my compositions (for example Dark Ages for cello and ruin for 6×3 instruments) which are concerned with composition and be implication listening as an attempt to bring order to a (fictionally) broken-down remnant of  . . .  what? the distant past? the depths of the subconscious?

Another point of departure was to reconceive the electric guitar itself, neither as an expanded (or impoverished, depending on one's point of view) version of its «classical» forebear, nor as a medium for effecting a fashion-bound fusion with its familiar commercial vocabulary. transmission uses a «hybrid» instrument equipped with both «electric» and «acoustic» outputs; its playing techniques relate more or less distantly to both of the aforementioned traditions, but more closely to what Derek BAILEY calls «non-idiomatic improvisation» (to which I would prefer the term «radically idiomatic»). Each of the six sections embodies a different angle of view on the instrument, as well as on the underlying «fabric», which in the end comes to the same thing, and also a changing relationship between the instrument and its electronic «environment» -- each section involves notated parts for one or more footpedals, used for pitch-shifting, timbral modulation and reverberation as well as volume.

The six sections are interspersed between the other parts of DARK MATTER with varying degrees of interpenetration, including (in Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae) the insertion of the fourth section into the structure of a larger composition.

The guitar timbres were devised in collaboration with Daryl BUCKLEY; the electronic sounds are performed using the LiSa sampling software developed by Frank BALDÉ at STEIM in Amsterdam.