ALFA#6_ There Was Something Delicious In The Absurdity

~ for Accordion, Trombones, Harp & String Orchestra • 2'18"

This piece was created with visual artist Joel Daniel Phillips and presented at Hashimoto Contemporary art gallery in San Francisco in December 2018.

Joel and I met in an art residency in Taos, New Mexico, in 2014 and talked about collaborating for a while. For “There Was Something Delicious In The Absurdity”, he made these 21 fantastic drawings creating a loop of 26 seconds that repeats 5 times before the music gets ready to start over.

Because it is designed to be looped all day in the art gallery, I have divided the music in the same five 26-seconds sections and set up a computer system that calls a different section every time the visual loop starts over. Consequently, the piece changes every time it plays.

Joel's work can be found at www.joeldanielphillips.com

An other version of the music was created for live performance with one single electronic accordion. To make it possible, I mapped the correct strings, harp and brass notes (as audio files) to the buttons of the Roland electronic accordion and triggered each of the 5 sets with a foot controller while playing the accordion part. This system allows me to change and fluctuate the tempo for each performance.

The piece was performed on March 8th 2019 at the Fort Wayne Museum Of Art in Indiana.
Video produced by Kay Gregg.
Exhibition curated by Josef Zimmerman.