PATTErns IN REPEAT

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Meredith Monk Stringsongs, IV. Phantom Strings (4’)
Cassandra Miller Perfect Offering (19’)
Clarice Assad Sonic Landscapes, I. Continuum (6’)

Rakhi Singh Violin
Donald Grant Violin
Ruth Gibson Viola
Alice Neary Cello

HUGH MORRIS

HUGH MORRIS

2022, piano, string quartet

HUGH MORRIS

Cassie Kinoshi, ‘ARTEFACT/AUTOMATON’

2026, piano, string quartet, electronics

The only way the European could make himself man was by fabricating slaves and monsters.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

Blacks have clearly functioned as both. But so have machines, particularly when anthropomorphized, embodied, and subject to questions about their abilities to think and their possession of souls and feared for their potential independence. As analyzed and argued in the pages ahead, they become explicit and inexplicit ciphers for ambivalences and anxieties about both race and technology. This is even more the case when they become framed as quite monstrous threats to sovereign notions of “man” or “the human machine”.

Louis Chide-Sokei, The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics (2015)

‘ARTEFACT/AUTOMATON’ draws on Louis Chide-Sokei’s concept of ‘black sonic fiction’to explore the Black body as automaton through sound and technology. It’s a space where Black music and sound become modes of critical reflection on technology, embodiment and power – human yet object, somewhere between man and machinery, then and now. In a world where artificial intelligence now sparks similar questions, the piece asks what it means to make music from that place. Realised through a combination of a Behringer 2600 synthesiser and the Arturia plugin emulation ARP 2600 V alongside amplified strings and piano, the piece is electronic and acoustic, simulated and embodied.

This work is also a personal first step toward bridging a longstanding love of ensemble writing with my love of synthesisers, shaped by the work of composer, synth player and programmer Dexter Wansel (in particular via the ARP Odyssey); Sun Ra’s use of electronics in live experimental performance; and the science fiction and music of the 1970s.

‘ARTEFACT/AUTOMATON’ takes inspiration from and attempts to understand these histories – sonic, technological, bodily – and asks what it means to make music from that place.

CASSIE KINOSHI

HUGH MORRIS