In response to the surge of anti-trans legislation in the US, the Playground Ensemble gathered recordings made by trans/non-binary folks telling their stories. This piece, Blue Butterfly, is a response to one of those recordings, and uses selections of the participant's own words, in their own voice, as part of the musical texture. The original audio is an extended story about a childhood friend and some formative experiences, and refers to the idea of the titular Blue Butterfly appearing, who can grant wishes. In selecting which parts of the audio to include in this new composition, I avoided the urge to simply retell the story. The original spoken words do that very well without my musical voice interjecting also. What I chose to do was to focus on the feelings expressed in the text, and to highlight those phrases which describe or evoke the speaker's emotional states. Musically, there's also an ongoing feeling of transition, of one thing becoming another - something which really resonates with me both as a person and as an artist. The combination of recorded vocals, processed electronic sound and a trio of live instruments presented some amazing opportunities to respond to these emotional concepts in an oblique and complex way. The sound-world thus created reflects my ongoing interests in the possibilities present in the interaction between "contemporary concert music" and electronic dance styles such as techno and D&B resulting in a hectic and disorientating collision of genres, eventually leaving the listener in a questioning limbo.
16 окт 2024
