cmd + c; cmd + v (2023)

The title refers to keyboard shortcuts on a computer to copy and paste a line of characters (e.g. words, numbers). The characters used in this piece are musical patterns represented in so-called "MIDI notation". By mapping the MIDI notation to prerecorded sounds these structures become audible. Musical phrases are copied over and over, sometimes with error, feeding themselves faulty copies of them, creating an incestuous cycle and mutating until they’re hardly recognizable. This „seeding“ of material is at the heart of this piece.

„Seeding“ on a line of characters forming a sentence could look like this:

This_is_my_explanation            									//a sentence

This_is_my_explanationThis_is_my_explanation     				   		//copied once

This_is_my_explanationThis_is_my_explanationtionThis_Is_mytitititi
This_is_my_explas_ms_ms_ms_ms_ms_mplanationThisplanationThis        	// copied and mutated

Over the duration of the piece a list of actions is performed in no particular order. These actions include seeding, but also creating silences, speeding up, slowing down and more. The sounds used to make these actions audible are recordings of piano, guitar, scrapped band rehearsals and synthesized sounds. Additionally, all processes are made visible by sharing the computer screen as a projection. Thus all mystique is lifted away, the incomprehensible machinations turn out to be nothing but a „cheap trick“. But this is no reason for disappointment. On the contrary: unmasking the compositional process, „letting everyone in on the joke“ opens up the possibility to follow the process like a tutorial. This open source mentality is an antidote to a model that puts the composer as a deity over all, a refusal to further participate in the ongoing myth making of geniuses. Lastly, this piece is performed using a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation). This program wasn’t intended to be used as a live instrument. While this piece surely doesn’t constitute a form of software hacking yet, it is a form of conceptual hacking the intended use of this software is. Misusing technology is an act of biting the hand that feeds you.


(update) ZKM version for 16 channels (2024)

Initially, I thought of this work as a purely formalist exercise in structure and sound. Since then, I began applying this process to recorded audio snippets I collected from interviews and news broadcasts about the Vietnamese diaspora living in Germany. To these snippets I added personal favourite recordings of both Western classical music and Vietnamese music. This revealed to me the possibility of creating a kind of commentary through a collage of spoken word and recorded music. This shift from a self-referential approach to one rooted in concrete, lived social reality has led me to reconsider and ultimately critique my own ideas about "experimental music."

The piece starts the same way as before, displaying all the different ways the material can be shaped and sculpted. The samples are cut up into tiny fragments of sound that are rearranged and serve to display a variety of microrhythms. This focus on the phenomenological aspects of sound shifts abruptly in the middle of the duration, and the actual samples come into focus and are fully revealed. Sounds that before served to give birth to musical structure, now show themselves to be full of personal meaning. It seems fitting to my understanding that behind the material that makes up a seemingly self-referential, detached and purely aesthetic composition lies a layer of personal attachments, questions of identity and a grappling with my own otherness. It is the goal of this revised version to mirror that process.