Max Posthoorn is a one of our wonderful postgraduate students at Box Hill Institute. Recently, there was a rather horrible industrial accident near our campus - a crane lost its load at a construction site, killing two workers and seriously injuring another. Max, who is very interested in construction sites, and who lives only a few blocks from the site of the accident, was very affected by this. He wrote a poem, "Crane," which combines thoughts on the accident with ancient Greek myths of the crane (the bird). He wanted to read it in Catherine Schieve's "Contemporary Ideas and Practices" seminar, and asked me to play some electronic sounds I was working on to accompany the poem. The sounds were made with some recent modules Antonio Tuzzi has developed for the VCV-Rack environment. I made a patch with them that emulated the patch I mostly wrote "Aardvarks IV" with, back in 72-75. So on October 2, in the tiny seminar room at Box Hill, as part of the class, we performed the poem and music. The sound recording is by Miriam Forte, another of the postgraduates, the photo is by Catherine Schieve. Max is reading, I'm playing the computer patch, and Rebecca Hart is being the lighting designer, holding the flashlight in her cellphone to provide Max a reading lamp.
Click on this sentence to download the sound file of the performance.
Enjoy!