Exchanges [Composition No. 11.6(4)]

This music was created both as a stand-alone piece for listening, and as an audio soundtrack for Karl Torok's video work Exchanges. The work owes its form to Karl's original strategy for sourcing a soundtrack; he asked 5 musicians (including myself) to independently create possible soundtracks for his final cut of the work. The resulting pieces exhibited such tremendous differences in terms of approach, idiom and instrumentation that Karl found his original plan of combining them simply too difficult to realise! So he handed the job of realising a final coherent piece of music out these disparate elements over to me. I used digital editing, processing and mixing techniques to create interactions, revise contributions and develop an architecture for a new synthesis of the original elements.

This version of Exchanges is therefore one possible reading of the near-infinite number of permutations available from editing and mixing the raw material supplied by the 5 musicians. It reflects how I personally feel about the material at the time of making this collage (March 2002). But this is in no sense intended to be definitive; every time I listen to this piece I'm aware of the millions of possible alternatives which other listeners may or may not prefer...

© Simon H. Fell 2002

back to main Bruce's Fingers index page

back to main on-line texts index

back to programme notes index