Machine Elves

8-channel electroacoustic music,

First performance at SSSP conference in Leicester (6/6/2012)

The piece is based on three, different but tightly mixed, layers of sounds. A layer of pre-recorded material of various sound sources, a layer of noisy synthesized sounds and a layer of clear pitched synthesized sounds. A gestural hybridic texture is followed by gradual transformations of the three layers into granular textures. The piece have been composed in the studios of the University of Huddersfield and my laptop. Equipment used for the realization of the piece include: 8 Genelec 1032 A speakers, MOTU 896mk3 audio interface, software such as CDP, Max/MSP 6, Reaktor 5, Nuendo 5. The title comes from the concept of ”self transforming machine elves”, coined by philosopher and ethnobotanist Terence Mckenna:

”They’re like jewelled self-dribbling basketballs and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in a high-speed mode where you’re being presented with thousands of details per second and you can’t get a hold on them … and these things are saying “Don’t give in to astonishment”, which is exactly what you want to do. You want to go nuts with how crazy this is, and they say “Don’t do that. Pay attention to what we’re doing”. What they’re doing is making objects with their voices, singing structures into existence. They offer things to you, saying “Look at this! Look at this!” and as your attention goes towards these objects you realise that what you’re being shown is impossible. It’s not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture, it’s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be the “Fabergé egg”, but these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a U.F.O., celestial toys, and the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive and can sing other objects into existence, so what’s happening is this proliferation of elf gifts, which are moving around singing, and they are saying “Do what we are doing” and they are very insistent, and they say “Do it! Do it! Do it!” and you feel like a bubble inside your body beginning to move up toward your mouth, and when it comes out it isn’t sound, it’s vision. You discover that you can pump “stuff” out of your mouth by singing, and they’re urging you to do this.”

Terence McKenna