An instrument for playing with samples from freesound.org, with a set of accompanying text scores that can be used to process your performance of this. Suitable for performance in a group using mobile phones as loudspeakers.

A typist transcribes texts contained in a Fluxkit into musical notation, which is displayed to performers (and audience). The music notation, along with the typed text, is then used as a framework for improvising by a group of performers. 



To play this piece, you also need to get or make a Fluxkit. A Fluxkit is a collection of event scores stored in a container (e.g. Water Yam by George Brecht). I made the piece with the Fluxkits Kirkos created in 2016 in mind, and used one of these to play the premiere. If you don’t have access to a Fluxkit, you could make one, for example by cutting up parts of the Fluxus Workbook (freely available online e.g. on the Monoskop website) and placing them in a box.

The first performance of this piece was played by Lina Andonovska, Hannah Miller, Adam Collins and Yseult Cooper Stockdale (as Kirkos) on 25.06.24 as part of an Irish Composers’ Collective concert in Unit 44, Dublin. I was the typist for the performance.

The software used for this performance (ChatMusic) is currently only available by request. Please get in touch if you're interested.

Inspired by an idea of Anaïs Fontanges, this is a web page that emulates ghost-hunting radio scanners as used by paranormal investigators. This idea sparked a period of fanatacism about radio and particularly about how the weird romance of the ephemerality radio somehow holds on even when you carry it into the digital domain (where the ephemerality is a little bit faked...)

It basically cycles randomly through a range of French and Irish web radio stations, with white noise faking a transition between stations! But sure the REAL ghost boxes are fakes too, aren't they....>>??????

Excerpts from Reality was written for a Crash Ensemble performance held in UCD, and draws on text from Reality Hunger, a text which is itself made from found text (hence the piece ties in to Stolen Music). In my piece, text drawn from the book is depicted on a video screen as clouds of particles arranged into the text which dissolve gradually and rearrange as music notation (which is algorithmically derived from the text). The video screen serves as a score for the performers, who are expected to interpret the overall visual and semiotic impression (notation, text, colours, movement) and use it as a source for improvisation. As the score is also improvised (by the composer, using an interface which allows selection of specific passages of text as well as control of various visual parameters and the algorithm used for translating into notation), a complex feedback loop between composer, performers and video arises: agency becomes distributed across the performers and composer in a way which is difficult to unravel. As such, it is an attempt to place the composer in the midst of performers as a fellow improviser.