About
Still from Fugal Systems #5: Fire Bowls and Selective Boundaries
Forthcoming musical performance Fugal Systems #7: Ghosts, Variations by Jordan Martins is a project encompassing jazz, sound, and performance. We’re investigating how the audience can actively tune in to the various strands of the music as they walk among the art installations and hear the work performed in one space, yet also hear the performance through the floorboards and walls of the other rooms.
The performance draws on recent research into musical games using both computer simulations and real musical interactions to trace how melodies evolve into structured languages within games. Five musicians spread across the multi-level space in stationary positions for a two hour durational performance, create enough acoustic porousness to allow sound bleed from level to level as the audience walks from room to room.
Over the course of the performance, the musicians play variations on the three sections of Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” composition--improvising, stretching out, repeating, or otherwise interpreting the melodic fragments as they like. Certain pre-determined music codes--short blasts of a certain quantity, droned notions, or rhythmic patterns--will be used as signals, to which each musician will have to respond if they hear another musician playing it. Musicians will also be encouraged to develop spontaneous sound codes that are not pre-determined in an effort to effect the playing and response of the other musicians in the site, creating an ad hoc language. Musicians are also effected by the audience since playing blocks will be in each room for them to interact with.