Theo Alexander

for viola, bass clarinet, and eight tape players

Performed by Charlotte Jolly (bass clarinet) and Meghan Cassidy (viola)

Cassette + Digital (48k/24bit wav) - flung002

Flung presents Theo Alexander’s ‘Stable Processes with Slow Ornaments’, an installed composition that submerges listeners and performers alike in ghostly halos of sound played by eight cassette tape players positioned around the performance space.

Cassette + Digital

Alexander created the piece during a residency at Britten-Pears Arts in Suffolk, and it was debuted in a former telephone switching station by Charlotte Jolly (bass clarinet) and Meghan Cassidy (viola). It is a site-specific installed composition, spatially arranged so that the piece can be heard in different ways, depending on your position.

The installation aspects sees the two musicians walking between different 'stations' where they find their score and a tape player. They can only perform measures of their score according to the cues heard on tape. Because all the tape players are on at once, the musicians need to listen closely through a dense field of sound to determine their cues. The tape parts were recorded using a mixture of vibraphone and organ, which was sampled from the organ at St Bartholomew's in Orford. From the start, white noise also features throughout, providing a layer of gentle haze pierced by clear pitches that beam and flicker.

The piece is essentially a single repeated chord sequence that transforms from very long to very short durations. As the durations get shorter, the musicians have to move faster between their stations and also progress more rapidly through their score. In this sense, the musicians are put into an absurd situation of labour that becomes more challenging over time. Like the musicians themselves, the material also wanders, from gentle sustained breath-like tones and fragile timbres, to more prominent melodic patterns and loops, where live and recorded sound eventually become impossible to disentangle from the tapes’ thrums, rasps, and drones.

This is Alexander’s first composition to use cassette tapes, a medium he grew familiar with when releasing music in various DIY scenes with his noise and metal bands between 2008-2015, and then his own label, Cellar Tapes from 2016-2020. Alexander’s fondness of cassettes and their place in this piece makes this release once again on tape all the more fitting. Alexander’s own live recording carefully documents the musicians, tape players, and the performance space to stunning effect, a haunting spatial play of sonic phantoms, reproducing the experience of the installation itself, swirling around you in the dark.

The concept for the piece was loosely inspired by a quote from John von Neumann, best known for his contribution to the development of nuclear weapons but also instrumental in the development of weather prediction technology: 'All stable processes we shall predict, all unstable processes we shall control.' Though it is not a political work, Alexander explains, there is ‘an undertone of critique regarding scientistic faith in technological progress’.

CREDITS

All music by Theo Alexander

Recorded by Theo Alexander in November 2022 at the former telephone-switching room in The Art Station, Suffolk, UK

Mixed and Mastered by Nicholas Moroz

Photography by Sophie Le Roux

Design by Nicholas Moroz

Supported by Britten-Pears Arts and the Vaughan Williams Foundation

Thanks to Sofi Nowell

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