DESCRIPTION:
Entoptic Landscape Version 2, for trombone, two tubas, fixed media (2013)

Sarah Gail Brand, trombone
Stuart Estell, tuba
Sam Underwood, tuba
Lauren Redhead, fixed media

Entoptic phenomena are experienced by all human beings. If you cover your eyes and shut out all light, for example by putting your hands over your closed eyes, you will see flashing lights and moving shapes. What you are seeing is the structure of your optic nerve. these are entoptic phenomena: a neurobiological experience.

Such phenomena have been hypothesised to have informed the earliest artworks. Their commonness to all people causes these artworks to remain intelligible today.

This music takes such phenomena as a starting point. It is slow moving, partially entering into ‘view’ and then gone again. The attempt to focus has the effect of obscuring it.

All of the performances of this music respond in some way to open notation. This version of this piece presented the performers with a variety of stimuli from precisely notated pitches, to graphemes, to text, to graphic notation derived from cave art. No two performances of this music are alike, but all hold much in common. Open notation has been employed not for reasons of accessibility but as a means of inviting the performers into the specific soundworld of the piece. --Lauren Redhead

*Recorded live at cafe OTO, 31.01.2014

Art by Dolfi Trost