And similar to Lisa, C-drik’s sounded out the number of people who died, again, an inspiration that we wish is not available to us. I borrow a line from C-drik’s statement to close this launch:
“The over mediatisation of the crisis generates a lot of noise, such as this composition; the music and images are distorted and full of glitches like parts of the information we receive every day and some of the decisions that are being taken by the authorities or ourselves.”
With what we do, we can either add to this noise, to distort and create glitches, or we retreat to reasonable contemplation, to feel our next step, in this dark alley we are all in at the moment.
Track Name: 252 || Date Created: 9&10 Feb 2021 || Date Recorded: 9&10 Feb 2021 || Duration: 252 seconds
252
The title of the piece (252) corresponds to the number of deaths in Germany on one specific day, hence the length of the piece is 252 seconds.
The graphic score is time based only ; dynamics, notes, tempi are not directly connected to any numbers, rather than that, they are often incidental, sometimes repetitive and deconstructed such as the video for which I used some simple pixelation effects - they represent the digitisation of all data whose amount became so huge that it sometimes gets lost in translation; some information is repeated on and on while some other is being erased, hidden or misinterpreted. There are so many numbers and such a variety of them that we tend to forget what they represent (deaths per million, deaths per day, people infected per day or month, people who recover without after-effects, others who do not recover, death by gender, age, and so on). The over mediatisation of the crisis generates a lot of noise, such as this composition; the music and images are distorted and full of glitches like parts of the information we receive every day and some of the decisions that are being taken by the authorities or ourselves.
252 may sound confusing and, I presume, for some irritating - the whole crisis is for most of us confusing and possibly irritating, I simply tried to amplify the noise.
The portion of text is based on numbers of deaths, cases, and so on in Germany where I live but my voice is not very clear, again, it is confusing.
What most of us keep in mind are not the numbers but who around us got infected, sick, disabled, died, lost someone, lost a job, lost money, lost an apartment, got a fine for not respecting a curfew, got stuck thousand of kilometres from home, became depressed, etc.