The Latest News (2019), for map and newspaper, asks how the politics of the media are changing our perception of place. His compositions seek to create an unprejudiced critical listening in which sounds and objects are perceived only in the here and now, not through received or traditional understandings about what they might or ‘should’ mean. Freiburg at Morat-Institut für Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft Stiftung. 25.01.2019 performed by ensemble recherché world premiere. article
I was taken by boat to a new destination across the Mediterranean Sea. It went inside a cold, dark, quiet place within the transport container. I used a small radio as a map to locate my place through the sound of the News. This was the only way to cross the border, to flee the unpredictable war that media politics had created.
News bombards our everyday lives, affecting the way we think and act. Mostly, it makes us feel unsafe where we live and creates unpleasant associations with certain things and specific places. The media instructs us to move from one place to another: to emigrate. This way, it draws a thought map controlled by political language and images. The Latest News uses a speculative sound composition as an open form to rethink the politics of the News through a transparent map. The map represents city locations and has been altered into various shapes to create a genuine meaning. The musicians then create their map and integrate their heart pulses in real-time with their map by using the transparent score while watching the latest News. Consequently, associations are changed, and other focus points are created, allowing both the musicians and listeners to be liberated from the predominant meaning of the News.
This composition investigated the News broadcast material through the notion of a musical score. The score material includes critical thinking of the practice of “Digging or Excavating” for sound. Moreover, this work addresses sound composition in real-time as a crucial process of interacting with and experiencing one’s environment. Thus, it needs to reconstruct the structure of News broadcast compositional design, which critically reflects the politics of media and its relation to society. This is through questioning what if the news experience from the press was altered as a musical composition. In this case, how can the score extract the elements behind the News to sound material? Then, how sounds that information from the News?
(The Latest News commissioned by ensemble recherche in collaboration with the Swedish Art Grants Committee, international residency programme 2016-2018)
