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Be A Part of the Swarm!

2/26/2017

On a Winter’s Night A Traveler and its translation capture the rich imagination of the author, who charts a course through an expansive and mellifluous vocabulary. Audience members are encouraged to begin streaming the story on their phones an hour before they've even arrived at the venue. When they arrive they'll be greeted by a continuation of what they've already been listening to, as it spreads out from their individual space to a collective space we are all experiencing.

Recently, Mnemosyne has been building upon the idea of a hive or swarm of sounds that surround the listeners. We achieve this by having audience members stream one or more of our electronic tracks through their phone's speakers. The hope is that audience members will converge on Prospero’s Books like a swarm of bees, all while projecting the audio from their phones.

In many of our environmental installations, this has dispersed events not only in space but in sequence as well. The lag encountered, however fractional, by each individual phone, allows for many pleasing coincidental delays of each sound in the accompaniment.

Beyond the phone track, there will be five channels of unique audio creating a landscape of sound within the store. How active participants move through the bookstore will transform their experience and what they hear.

-Russell

Creating On A Winter's Night Part 1

2/20/2017

In several of my recent electronic compositions, the focus has been on manipulating the voice by adding pitch-shifted and formant-shifted layers on top of each other, enriching the harmonic complexity of a given voice. I am trying to both tease out the natural resonances and add my own harmonic content embedded in the overtones.

When I explained this to Will Leathem of Prospero's, he suggested the book If On a Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino, as a source of inspiration. This postmodernist novel has a multiplicity of different voices embedded within the frame story format. I am using as many of these voices as I can, trying to make some comprehensible and others less so, to give the overall impression of simultaneity.

For the first hour, you will simply be listening to me read the novel, much like a book on tape. I have added musical elements to accompany each section of the narrative. These melodic fragments, or cells, are to be used later on in the performance by live improvisers as seed material, providing structural associations that the listener can make between these two events separated by almost 90 minutes of time.

This first hour of the story will be broadcast in the downstairs portion of Prospero's on a number of our portable speakers. These speakers will be located among the stacks of books with the volume turned down to innocuous levels. We encourage audience members to stream what they are hearing also on their phones, or in earbuds if they like, so they can better follow the story.

The first hour ebbs and flows and at the 60-minute mark, we begin playing Fragmented Realities in the upstairs portion of the venue. The downstairs section continues through the first chapter of Outside the Village of Malbork. At one hour and 22 minutes the downstairs track ceases and after that, all of the music takes place upstairs. At this time, the live stream will shift to accompany what is going on upstairs. The hope is that the first hour of introductory material will also serve as an enticement to casual customers of Prospero's that night to stay for the rest of the show.

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Be A Part of the Swarm!

Creating On A Winter's Night Part 1

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