— A Novel In The Form Of A Car Bomb —
March - May 2009
ANITFOACB is an hour long modern tragedy performed outdoors at dusk and is accompanied by a live chorus and an octophonic vehicular orchestra. The work is based on by a novel that artist Mary Walling Blackburn wrote on twitter in early 2009. Sounds arise from three concentric rings consisting of 8 cars, 8 boom-boxes (portable radios), and 12 singers. Together, these sonic elements and their conflicting narrators, re-imagine the car as something other than bomb or vehicle.
On May 23 2009, a workshop staging of the piece was performed at Industry City on Brooklyn's working waterfront in collaboration with Mary Walling Blackburn. The staging involved a local team of over 40 volunteers. The performance structure involved an audience of 100 people seated in a circle facing outward, with a 12 person chorus inside the circle, and 8 boomboxes (radios) and 8 cars situated outside the circle. From inside the cars, 3 actors addressed the audience and were broadcast on an unused FM radio frequency and amplified through the boombox-radios.
The music and the physical movement of sound within these concentric circles intends to take the audience into 8 different worlds, embodied in the 8 cardinal directions, and inhabited by the various narrators of the piece: car, chorus, radio. These worlds can exists as a realm of the physical world or as one of the mind or both. The 8 worlds each have an imagined space and style of music.
The musical material is likewise mapped onto the compass face. This is done by overlapping 2 pentagrams. In standard music notation, notes are written on what is referred to as a 5-line staff or pentagram. The lines of the pentagram are meaningless unless a clef sign, which indicates the range of notes, is attached. By overlapping two pentagrams perpendicularly we create a system to generate music which echoes this outward radiation/explosion. What I like about these overlapping pentagrams is that there is a singular centralized point, which has the possibility of existing as one note and at the same time four notes. So from one dot we get a chord of four distinct pitches. As one dot radiates outward, exploding in all 8 directions an intricate system of notes (pitches) is created.