Eternal Rave
Fall 2022
- You may interact with the MIDI controller (sixteen buttons).
- The music changes over time.
Most notably during different times of the day, starting:
3AM (Early Morning), 6AM (Morning), 12PM (Afternoon), 6PM (Evening), 9PM (Night)
Eternal Rave intersects two topics of concern to me: time and control.
I mainly make electronic music that may be considered experimental. Each piece usually lasts for 2-6 minutes, and is hyper-specific in detail. This art installation is a purposeful deviation from both these artistic constraints.
Time: Time is structurally nested in multiple layers, such as seconds in minutes in hours in days, individual events in larger segments of a whole childhood, or measures in larger sections of a piece. The wider structures of Eternal Rave are more static (eg. the music at night is more intense than in the daytime), but the details change using aleatoric or randomized composition and effects, along with parameters affected by seconds, minutes, days of the week, months, and so on. This static-aleatoric axis intersects with the audience’s own experience of time, as they either slowly listen to the music morph throughout their stay, or experience radically different music as they enter and re-enter over the course of the installation’s stay.
Control: The aforementioned techniques that enable me to write music that evolves and can function long-term also involve me letting go of control as an artist. As someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety, as well as having grown up in a cult (which is inherently controlling and abusive), I can sometimes find it difficult to let go of control, especially when it comes to my art—perhaps because of perfectionism and/or fear. This need for control can be isolating as well.
Eternal Rave forces my hand to let go of control. The MIDI controller provided also relinquishes some of my control, as it lets the audience participate and interweave their experiences with my own.
Visuals: The visuals reveal both the passage of time and the compositional structure of the work. It also allows the audience to visually see some of the ways their interaction changes the sound.