that’s what they said

Amplified quartet (violin, bass clarinet, electric guitar, cello), multimedia and live electronics

that’s what they said is a piece and an artistic statement developed alongside Distractfold Ensemble in 2022. It is scored for four amplified performers (both playing their instruments and using their voices), as well as multimedia which consists of fixed audio-visual elements and live electronics.

The piece generally addresses ‘deepfake’, both as a technological tool and as a ‘genre’. It explicitly places all five people involved in the process centre stage, including myself and the four ensemble members. Incorporating AI generated or manipulated text, audio, and visuals, the piece looks at ways by which words escape their meanings, and sounds detach from their origins. It is framed within a state of play where story-telling interacts with plausibility, and where fabricated speech becomes a form of musical discourse, eventually articulating an emergent latent space where lived experience consistently outweighs the automated, the generalised, and the stereotyped.

The work revolves around an active position-taking in the age of technology and (geo-) political instability. It is about re-embodying our own avatars, as well as listening to what’s not been said in the news. It is about encountering mis-representation. It is about resistance.