GEMINILOGGBOOKOBERDADAISTICUS
Album release: Un coup de dés
One day last year I tossed my twelve-faced die for a while and wrote down the numbers that came up. The series interpreted as pitch classes became the theme of Un coup de dés, a suite of fifteen variations. I conceived of various things to explore in the variations, mostly standard fare like inversion and retrograde, as well as drastic contrasts in tempo and two variations that map the theme to quarter tones by halving all intervals. I recorded the variations, mostly using eurorack modular and a four track portastudio.
Now the album has been released. It also features Blaker Skanse for solo melodica, maracas, and interruptions by assistants in the audience and the miniature Toile d'araignée, originally composed for the yearly compilation of a defunct modular synth forum.
Something funny happened on the release party one week ago. Some dude came up and handed me an enormous booklet which turned out to be his own edition of Mallarmé's poem. Clearly he had done his research on my piece, correctly noting that the theme consisted of 103 notes. Why, he wondered, was there any hidden meaning in that? I told him that I just rolled the die and wrote numbers until I had what seemed sufficiently many.
Un Coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hazard
Toute Pensée aimait un Coup de Dés
(The poem ends with this last line, except for the homonymous misquotation of émet as the dude with the booklet had suggested.)
Apparently the idea of abolishing hazard by repeating and varying a random theme has not been much explored. In fact, I don't know of any other compositions that do this, but perhaps there are. Anyway, have a listen here:
Shortly there will be a CD edition too.
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