A touch, fraught with ghosts

notes

This piece was composed for the Western Australian Laptop Orchestra, a student ensemble at the WA Academy of Performing Arts. I've been interested in the idea of sensitivity recently - becoming sensitive to things is a way of finding more and more chaos and richness in them, and in thinking of sensitivity as well as knowledge there might be a better framework for relating an arts practice to other ways of engaging creatively with the world (be they agriculture, psychology, medicine, construction...). This sat in alignment with some writing I had read by Judith Butler, talking about our capacity to cause each other harm, or at least to enormously effect one another through touch. I wanted to write a piece that offered a space to tune in to one's touch, and so in this piece the performers are asked to hold aloft a small object on the cone of a speaker (or on the surface of a transducer), as gently as possible. Rather than encouraging improvisation with this process, the performance is one of attempting to maintain an impossible degree of stillness, and the sonic surface of the piece is created by the fluctuations in this stillness that are more or less totally inevitable.