Thoughts about a body of water led me to look for its reflections in the relationship of the orchestra musician to her part and with the piece as a whole. With the help of timbre of various instruments and aleatorics I aimed to create an organic construction of multi-layered musical material, merging individual musical lines into one directed sound mass.
Also, while writing this work, I was interested in expressionist harmonies. I chose to treat their thickness as a texture and looked for ways to soften and lengthen musical material.
Performed by Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Modestas Pitrėnas.

a body of water

From Album "50 Ballets" ButtercupMetalPolish w/ Alexandre Babel

Caudeval By Night

Tashi Dorji - Improvisation I

Cross Waves is a Canadian Sound Art series presented by New Adventures in Sound Art that includes performances and internet radio programs curated by eight media artists representing various regional and cultural perspectives in Canada: Chantal Dumas, Steve Bates, Jason Ryle, Peter Courtemanche, Janna Graham, Christof Migone, Anna Friz and Eleanor King.

CrossWaves 6 - "Material Sounds" curated by Anna Friz

Intergrade Hole
Sound sculpture, 12:25min (loop), 2015

"I have often wondered, when I looked at the tiny oscillations and pulsations that compose us, where, then, are our thoughts, Johor? Where, what we feel? For it is not possible that these are not matter, just as we are. In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living — in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?"
— Doris Lessing, 'The Making Of The Representative For Planet 8'

Accompanied by voices from different spaces and times, Intergrade Hole by Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi and the composer Gaile Griciute takes the listener on a journey through "a deserted landscape sizzling with change". The listener is invited to enter a hole, an empty space filled with multiple temporal realities and gravitational forces. As these realities collide with each other, the boundaries between individual/collective, facts/fictions, past/present/future, are being questioned.

Nguyen-Chi travelled to Antwerp to record Otobong Nganka's recollections of her journey through the ecologically exploited landscape of Namibia, a memory of the past. These fragments are interwoven with text excerpts by Doris Lessing's space fiction novel Canopus in Argos: Archives, a memory of the future, and field recordings from Frankfurt and Vilnius resulting in an intricately layered cinematic libretto.

Installation view: contemporaryartdaily.com/2015/09/otobong-nkanga-at-portikus/
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Credits
Concept and composition: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Libretto: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Text material: Doris Lessing, Otobong Nkanga
Voices: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Otobong Nkanga
Sound material: Field recordings in Antwerp, Frankfurt and Vilnius
Sound recording: Gaile Griciute, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi
Sound engineering: Tom Forsythe

Special thanks to Arturas Bumsteinas, Claudia Famulok, Clare Molloy, Otobong Nkanga, Philippe Pirotte, Fabian Schöneich, Portikus Frankfurt am Main.

a body of water

Gaile Griciute

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