Sarah Belle Reid

Here is a description from J. Lynch about how he approached interpreting and realizing the score:

“Imagine that the notations could fall, spin, tilt, and teeter’ is the primary guidance on my postcard, and this is where I started, but also with the conscious bucking of my tendency to read a score like this in a still linear fashion (my brain still wants to go from left to right). Rather, I wanted to try and come at the score more holistically or perhaps, to be more accurate, from several places at once, becoming more concerned with intersections and relationships. If this has a traceable trajectory though, maybe it is simply inwards.

It occurs to me that within the title is a question of balance and unbalance. One can tilt in order to balance, but to teeter is always to be on the verge of falling. This is how I have tried to treat the sounds. Some gestures to stabilize and some to destabilize. These in relation to pitch, timbre, distortion, meter, feedback and so on. I’m still fairly close to the beginning of the journey of making music with modular synths, so it’s more a case of curious uncoverings and exciting moments than strictly purposeful performance. In effect, the interpretation of Tilt/Teeter is a various process of the modulation/filtration of sounds that try to unbalance or rebalance each from tonal stability, timbral stability, and metric stability. The score in some instances dictates the number of gestures, but sometimes I have stayed with a particular shape or mark for as long as felt right.

I identified nine different timbral/sound possibilities within the score (though I suppose one might find fewer, or many more) and set about trying to realise them. For example, the two large partial circles I have rendered with two cassette tape loops of my voice that have distinct gaps (they turn and spin you see, and the score itself reminded me of a cassette with its two differently sized large circles); though the gaps are often obscured by having played them through a Morphagene (they spin here too, at least conceptually if not physically), they are discernible. The twelve iterations of small circles/dots, I sounded with the contact mic in Ears which in the event also pleasingly picked up a lot of noise from the maintenance work on the huge aircon near to the space I was in, and the divergent lines of dashes and dots with Volca Beats hi hats (the way these pan apart over time is the only overtly spatial gesture I used in terms of the stereo field). The other sounds were made with sine waves, feedback from a Wasp filter and Plague Bearer, and a few other Eurorack things controlled with a Microbrute, function, and two LFOs.

I made a live pass for each sound following the score and my interpretation of its points of intersection, and didn’t allow myself to edit, but rather used each pass to try to engage with distinct elements of the score, hoping that the end result would also carry with it a sense of (un)balance, rotation, and points of near collapse. So, it becomes a very gestural and haptic performance, even though it is multi-tracked, as to make things tilt or teeter, I had to intervene, problematise and trip, even as I played. As I said, the music moves inwards I think, but not toward the centre. It is off centre, a discarded seesaw with the fulcrum in the wrong place. A broken, off-kilter thing. Inwards, then down further in, and away.”