FLESH, written for Jack Dettling, is a work for vocalizing pianist and electronics conceived as a series of images: a long, pensive walk in a faraway city; a simple song relentlessly and violently interrupted; a train barreling toward an unknown destination; a computer that studied poetry with Christopher Knowles; an uneasy coexistence of the sacred and the profane (a Bach chorale and 1980's shock radio); and, finally, the frenetic energy of an amusement park tamed by the vagaries of a wandering mind. FLESH seeks to depict both the serendipitous beauty and arbitrary danger, or even violence, of the technological age by using both generative processes and extreme noise to create sonic environments that the pianist must navigate. The generative processes consist of decisions made by the computer to produce not only combinations of sounds but also musical notation and poetic texts that the pianist incorporates into his performance in real time. The texts incorporated into the music of FLESH are not necessarily intended to be comprehensible throughout the work, but rather as one more sonic element in a constantly evolving musical texture. Noise is used throughout the piece as an ever-returning sign of something seemingly ominous that at length proves to be more mysterious and less straightforward, a kind of terrifying ecstasy.
Listen to Bill Seaman's remix, ABSTRACTED FLESH, here.