Machine Spectre for Chamber Orchestra & Electronics
Performed by Alarm Will Sound
Premiered at and commissioned by the Mizzou International Composers Festival July 2024. Sponsored by the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation.
Machine Spectre for chamber orchestra and electronics meditates on the material vitality and fallibility of technological devices. The piece unfolds as a complex assemblage of myriad sonic histories, inter-material identities and fragmented interwoven selfhoods. Its poly-temporal musical body is made up of bits and pieces of technological sounds from the past, present and future as well as earthly sounds of acoustic instruments and human performers - hence, giving it a cyborgian identity. While the material nature of technology is often overlooked, computers, smartphones, etc. are made up of countless raw materials that are extracted from the earth; Plastic, is derived from cellulose, coal, and crude oil amongst numerous other things, and microprocessors are comprised of copper, cobalt, iron, and quartz, as well as dozens more elements. Machine Spectre imagines a musical cyborg where the spectre of these earthly organic materials are animate and autonomous. The “illegitimate offspring” of its technological origins, origins which it is “exceedingly unfaithful to” (Haraway), this cyborgian being is in a constant state of chaotic emergence, seeking to re-wild itself beyond anthropocentered conceptions and towards its earthly, material genesis.