Performed by SWR/SO conducted by François-Xavier Roth
Recorded live at Baarsporthalle in Donaueschingen on October 21st, 2012

Itself (2012) for orchestra

Torso of Air | Stapled Flesh (2017)
written for and premiered by Ensemble Linea & Jean-Philippe Wurtz
commissioned by Festival Musica
Auditorium de France 3 Alsace
October 10, 2017

Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4TxcpRNqw4

Keiko Murakami, flutes; Jean-Marc Foltz, clarinets; Philippe Koerper, tenor sax; Deepa Goonetilleke, horn; Thierry Spiesser, trombone; Rémi Durupt & Victor Hocquet, percussion; Marco Fusi & Winnie Huang, violin; Elodie Gaudet, viola; Elsa Dorbath, cello; Sven Kestel, double bass

Desire, though often fleeting, is wrought with substance – a heavy feeling which sits at the pit of your stomach, an obsession that weighs on your mind and which refuses to leave until it does. Desire, though a feeling, is rooted deep in the body, in the flesh of a human being. The erotics of performance, the movement of body, the energy and friction between objects is something that I feel is at the foundation of music-making. After all, is it not this friction that causes vibration to coalesce into what we hear and experience? 

The title of the piece comes from the work of two artists of Asian origin – the young queer Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong and the surrealist, mid-Twentieth century Japanese photographer Kansuke Yamamoto.  Each artists deals with desire and the body by drawing forth the corporeal through the abstract and vice versa. Yamamoto’s piece Stapled Flesh is a photograph of a woman’s back, she is seated, her skin illuminated, her hair falling over her shoulders while a line of fifteen large, rigid staples cut down her spine, creating a visual tension between the ethereal and the somatic. In his piece “Into the Breach,” a poem prefaced by an epigraph by the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, Ocean Vuong opines, “To love another man — is to leave no one behind to forgive me. I want to leave no one behind. To keep & to be kept. The way a field turns its secrets in peonies. The way a light keeps its shadow by swallowing it.” In these final lines, Ocean literally transforms the most ethereal substance – light – into something that possesses a very physical trait – the ability to swallow, which is a behavior that has any number of biological and sexual connotations. In my work, then, I seek to find the narrative tension between substance and non-substance, sound and silence, sheer force and simple ease.  This piece for Ensemble Linea, like my previous piece for the group, is an exercise in musical dramaturgy, except the characters are the performers and the instrument and the drama is the point of contact between them and the sound that results.

Torso of Air | Stapled Flesh

For Soprano and Ensemble
Recording performed by Juliet Fraser and Klangforum Wien, conducted by Bas Wiegers.
Commissioned by SWR, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and Casa da Musica Porto. 
First performed by Juliet Fraser and Klangforum Wien, conducted by Titus Engel at Donaueschingen Musiktage, 14 October 2016.

View score - 
https://issuu.com/editionpeters/docs/ep14188_online

Skin (2015-16)

HTP_001

Spirit Labour, a visual essay by Hugo Glendinning and Adrian Heathfield
http://www.adrianheathfield.net/project/spirit-labour/
music by Aisha Orazbayeva
photo by Hugo Glendinning

Spirit Labour Opening

Juliet Fraser, voice. Antoine Maisonhaute, violin. Hélène Colombotti, percussion. Recorded live at Royaumont Voix Nouvelles 2017. 

In her poem Drowned Man, Fiona Sampson paints two people, together, asleep. Their small movements – the turning (of the back), the crossing (of the legs), the throwing (of an arm) – are echoes of their worlds: connected and disparate. In any bed but one’s, the singer and violinist share an intimate space of listening, but never quite touch musically. Their worlds are echoes of words and phrases that linger, on the edge of comprehension.

Sivan Eldar: Any bed but one's - Excerpt (Royaumont Voix Nouvelles)

Short excerpt from 'the traces that remain', performed by members of the LSO at LSO St Luke's July 2018.

for 3 Gramophones, Stroh Violin, Stroh Cello, Bass Clarinet, Percussion, Sine Waves

for video of full piece please see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQcX3aU0Pxs

the traces that remain LSO (Excerpt- full vid below)

Photo: Cathy Pyle

Lisa Illean
Weather a Rare Blue
Extract of movement 1, double-exposure
www.lisaillean.com.au

Recorded at RCM Studios, November 2018

Taylor MacLennan, flute
Alex Roberts, clarinet
Emmanuelle Fleurot, piano
David Lopez, violin
Morag Robertson, viola
Deni Teo, cello
Lisa Illean, electronics

Lisa Illean — Weather a Rare Blue [clip]

Performed live April 5, 2019 
Conrad Prebys Music Center Concert Hall, UC San Diego

(listen with headphones)

Helmut Lachenmann: Dal Niente (Intérieur III)

Performer: Contrechamps
Conductor: Beat Furrer

The composition is an attempt to reconstruct Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd Communist International. The piece is part of the program “Reconstruction” of the Structural Resistance Group (StRes), dedicated to reconstruction of lost monuments or utopian projects of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s.

Brief glossary:

Contra-relief – a term introduced by Vladimir Tatlin to designate three-dimensional space compositions made from expressly "unartistic" materials (iron, cardboard, wood, glass, plaster etc., sometimes combined with household items or fragments of ready-mades), that are both objects of art and art itself...

Vladimir Tatlin [1885 - 1953], Russian artist, designer, scene-designer, a major representative of innovative art of the 1920s, founder of artistic constructivism. Author of the Monument to the 3rd Communist International ("Tatlin Tower")…

Monument to the 3rd Communist International ("Tatlin Tower") – was displayed in December 1920 in Moscow during the 8th Congress of Soviets. The structure 1.5 times higher than the Eifel Tower was designed as an administrative and propaganda centre of Comintern, an organization that prepared the mankind for the worldwide revolution…

Brief description:

A structure made of metal beams and four transparent cubic capacities revolving with different speeds was to accommodate Comintern’s executive, legislative and propaganda agencies. The diagonal of the "Tatlin Tower" was connected with the two spirals encompassing it, while the revolving capacities were integrated into the bare frame structure. The original five-meter-high model of the "Tatlin Tower", last time displayed in 1930, was later lost (the most accurate of many “Tower” model reconstructions was made in Russia in 1992-93).

http://fancymusic.ru/dmitri-kourliandski-negative-modulations/

Dmitri Kourliandski - Contra-Relief

rest in power, Réka Kutas Rosi Rehformen Themsen
assembled from  Réka solo at Verein08, Vienna, March 2014
Réka & Eric on the same program
and Réka with Primordial Undermind (+ Eric, Christoph Weikinger, Roy Culbertson III and guest Vincenzo Granato) at Arena Wien, October 2015

Remembering Rosi (a Réka Kutas  live mix)

Sivan Eldar is a composer who uses instrumental, electronic, and found sounds to create compositions for live concerts, theater, dance, radio broadcast, gallery spaces... (www.sivaneldar.com)

Sivan Eldar: Any bed but one's - Excerpt (Royaumont Voix Nouvelles)

Sivan L. Eldar

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