performance stills by Dan Nichols/Aphorism Productions (video forthcoming)
we continue to sustain ourselves
60 minute sound performance work with two contrabass clarinets, viola, percussion, live audio feedback, Twitter-activated audio processing, and surface mounted transducers on foam objects
first performed at Vanderbilt University Space 204 in Nashville, TN and at Elastic Arts in Chicago, IL late September 2019
direction and compositional framework: alejandro t. acierto
performed by alejandro t. acierto, contrabass clarinet, audio processing/programming, and objects; Ammie Brod, viola; Zach Good, contrabass clarinet; Ryan Packard, percussion, objects, and live feedback;
we continue to sustain ourselves is an evening-long work for two contrabass clarinets, viola, percussion, and interactive media. Working with feedback as a broadly defined phenomena, this work becomes a way todevise other forms of relation and being, where our bodies intersect, play, and intervene on and with technological systems built as extensions of ourselves. A meditation for queers of color, feedback becomes a metaphor that articulates our orientations as it registers our proximities. It reveals itself in the space between the input and output and overwhelms us with a trace of what has always existed. Here, we are made present in the recognition of our past and in the insistence of our continuation – the ongoing loop where the past is amplified until its not, where the future is held under the conditions of space, and where the present is contingent on the then and there. For feedback that was previously always avoided, hushed, and excluded from audio systems, we envision its presence as a reminder to sustain our our bodies and ourselves. Though noisy in its recurrence, this feedback offers us a moment of refuge, a moment of forever, a moment of always.