Poem by
Ammons
"Landscape with figures
When I go back of my head
down the cervical well, roots
branch
thinning, figuring
into flesh
and flesh
glimmers with man-old fires
and ghosts
hollowing up into mind
cry from ancient narrowing
needle-like caves:
a depth of contact there you'd
think would hold, the last
nerve-hair
feeding direct from
meat's indivisible stuff:
but what we ride on makes us ride
and rootless mind
in a thundering rove
establishes, disposes:
rocks and clouds
take their places:
or if place shifts by a sudden breaking
in of stars
and mind whirls
where to go
then like a rabbit it
freezes in grass, order
as rock or star, to let whatever can, come,
pass, pass over: somewhere another human
figure moves or rests, concern
for (or fear of) whom
will start and keep us.
"1
Composition of fragments
Landscape with figures I (2012) is a 16 channel endless sound installation, first shown 22th to 24th of october 2012 in Studio A, Rokkans Hus, Bergen (Artistic Research Forum). It became integrated in Landscape with figures II, as variable sound installation situations within a more fixed work.
Composing earlier works I have had parallel cycles of events in mind, which appear in new constellations in a kaleidoscopic manner. With initial outlines, detail work take over to fill bubbles of the kaleidoscope. Landscape with figures I was created as a large number of preprosessed sound fragments, as variations within a few main categories. The fragments should be complete statements alone, and work in any order or superpostion with other categories of fragments. Durations vary between a few seconds and a couple of minutes.
Constant new constellations of textures can create endless compositions.
Arne Nordheims installation Poly-Poly (1970) consisted of 6 independent tape loops. These would not meet at the same point for 102 years.2 Landscape with figures I, with more than 1200 fragments, independently triggered in superposition and spatialized, would be a much longer composition, if the intention really was to exhaust all possibilities. This self-composing installation can work as a sketchbook for interactions between musical ideas over a long period of time.
1 A. R. Ammons Collected poems 1951-1971, p. 175.