Four songs about optimism, uncertainty, insincerity, & emotion.

Laura Cocks — flute [2] & bass flute [3] (lauracocks.biz)
Laura Fontanills — vocals [2, 4]
Francesca Pratt — drums & percussion [1, 2, 4] (instagram.com/francpratt)
Joel Rust — music & lyrics, vocals and other instruments
Adam Rust — additional mixing (adamrustmusic.com)
Charles Mueller and Olive Forgash — mastering (tinypantherrecording.com)
Anna Sikorska — artwork (instagram.com/conversationalcanvases/)

Thanks to: Ryaan Ahmed & Godfrey Rust 

distance

the book

wellspring

a shallow ocean

an awakening voice was commissioned by the Melos Sinfonia, and first performed at the St. Petersburg Philharmonia as part of the Sound Ways Festival.

This piece has been a significant departure for me; it has far greater dynamism and drive than my previous works, and focuses more on moment-to-moment changes of the sound material, so that the work is constantly in flux. Contradictorily, perhaps, I feel it has more of a spiritual or mystical message – something solid emerging out of this quicksilver, perhaps only after the piece ends.

an awakening voice

Who will we be

TRIO TRIO TRIO is built in three sections, which each contain three sub-sections; its structure is a trio of trios, hence the title. However, it attempts to make the trio itself sound like more than three instruments, or like one super-instrument; or, sometimes, both at once. Against these more structural concerns, the musical material of the piece is built around continual expansion, with tiny gestures and seeds growing, flowering, and vanishing.

The piece was first performed by the Eblana String Trio; it was commissioned by the Park Lane Group, with support from the RVW Trust.

www.joelrust.com

TRIO TRIO TRIO

Aleksei Gastev was one of the leading poets of the early Soviet Union; in 1922, Nikolay Aseev called him ‘the Ovid of miners and metalworkers’. He also became one of its key labour theorists, founding the Central Institute of Labour which trained over half a million workers in new methods of production, before being purged in 1939. In both aspects of his work, Gastev was obsessed with blurring the lines between human and machine, convinced that this was key to both creativity and productivity. The ten poems in Pack of Orders – the first five of which I have set – describe the creation and operation of what we now might call robots or cyborgs. The piece casts the four musicians as slightly malfunctioning androids, detailing Gastev’s vision with a mixture of cultish monomania and distracted confusion.

This recording is taken from a live Performance by The Hermes Experiment at King's Place, London, on 16 February 2017.

Pack of Orders
Aleksei Gastev (1921)

I
Forty thousand in a line.
Attention: an eye on the pressure gauge - solder.
Cast iron band-views.
Line Check - volley.
Shot along the line.
Shell’s trajectory - ten millimeters from foreheads.
Thirty foreheads stripped - the people scrapped.
Thousand A - east.
Column 10 - to the west.
Twenty thousand - freeze.

II (simultaneous with III)
Chronometer, on duty.
To rigs.
Rise.
Pause.
Charge of attention.
Supply.
Enable.
Self-propelled.
Stop.
Half a minute exposure.
Switch.
Operation B.
Receiving two, receiving four.
Seven.
Series twenty into operation.

III (simultaneous with II)
Doctors, in ranks.
Raise the temperature.
Increase by nine tenths of a degree.
The top ten.
Small pause.
Increase D to one hundred.
Large pause.
E to one thousand
To rigs, blades, microscopes.
Increase further.
Five-tenths.
S to one million.
Thirty cities.
Twenty states.
Agitprop-cannon.
Work-attack-extra.

IV
Prismatic homes.
A pack of twenty districts.
Into a press.
Flatten into a parallelogram.
Tighten to 30 degrees.
On screws and wheels.
City block tank,
diagonal movement.
Cut streets not trembling.
Excess thousands of calories to workers.

V
Funeral at the cemetery of the planets.
Roar in the catacombs of the worlds.
Millions, to future hatches.
Billions, stronger guns.
Servitude of mind.
Shackles of heart.
Engineered inhabitants.
Drive them to the geometry of the neck.
The logarithms of their gestures.
Opaque their romance.
Tons of anger.
Normalization of speech from pole to pole.
Phrases on the decimal system.
Boiler-room enterprise of speeches.
Destroy literature.
Throat around tunnels.
Force them to talk.
Sky - red for excitement.
Gears - overspeed.
Brainmachines - loaded.
Kinoeyes - installed.
Electronerves - work.
Arteriopumps - start.

Pack of Orders

machine for turning bread into stones

Shanghai's rapid transformation has left it an uneven city, struck through with contrasts — not least in the aural realm. Its sound spaces vary from rich to bland, westernized to traditional, loud to quiet, wild to anesthetized. This piece features eleven recordings from the Huangpu, Pudong, Jing'an and Xuhui districts, presenting the left channel of one against the right channel of another, switching between different combinations that flatten or exaggerate the city's asymmetries.

Shanghai|Simultaneity (excerpt)

"All are of the dust, and all turn to dust again." Ecclesiastes 3:20, KJV

Cover image: "O Grave, Where is Thy Victory?" Jan Toorop, 1892.

Coruscation

Nauset is a chamber opera created in collaboration with poet David Troupes. The work is set on an Atlantic beach at night, where a man has drowned.

Performers: Louise Kemeny (soprano), Gwilym Bowen (tenor), Josephine Stephenson (soprano), and the Kallion Ensemble, conducted by Christopher Stark.

Nauset

For a more complete overview of my work, please visit my main website, below!

Popular tracks by Joel Rust