The Spectre...is always already a figure of that which is to come

The rather long title of this work comes from Jonathan Boulter’s book ‘Posthuman Space in Samuel Beckett’s Short Prose’ in which the author, drawing on Derrida, makes the interesting claim that the characters we encounter in late Beckett prose, although disembodied, are none-the-less still located within the world. Over the past six years I have began to consider how we might think of the playback of recordings made by musicians as being a bit like a spectres - something from the past, now disembodied and removed from its original location, that is nonetheless able to communicate in the present. I am reminded of what the composer Morton Feldman said about his piece Three Voices (1982) in which the solo singer accompanies themselves with two prerecorded voices of themselves played back through speakers, one to the left and one to the right. Feldman described the relationship between the live soloist and the two speakers as being “tomb-stoney”.

This is the fourth piece I have written in which pre-recorded versions of those same events that are performed live are incorporated into musical works as part of the real-time experience. As with another recent piece, Towards a slowing of the past (2023), the recorded material heard during the performance of the piece is often presented in reverse, and sometimes pitch shifted, or speed adjusted. In the case of the new work, live and recorded materials are often heard simultaneously, or slightly ahead or behind one another. It is the complexity and the friction that arises from, on the one hand, the fixed/representative aspects of recordings, and, on the other, their ‘live presence’ that I find to be perceptually compelling.