Rob King, visuals
Patricia Alessandrini, electronics

Adagio pour l’absence is a collaborative work bringing together the physically-modelled interactive underwater world of Rob King’s Tentacles for Adagio with my own displacement of works from the repertoire of common-practice Western music in various performance and installation settings. In these compositions, the tension of performance and interpretation, in addition to my own tenuous relationship to the concert repertoire, is explored in situations heightening the distance between the musical work in question and its representation. In this case, the Adagio introduction of the Dissonances quartet of Mozart (KV. 465, no. 19) is submerged in an inky pool of darkness close to the ocean floor, where two primitive sea creatures seek life- sustaining micro-organisms dubbed ‘tenticules’. These creatures - controlled via two ipads in Belfast for this performance - interact with one another while at the same time subject to the presence of other oceanic avatars; these latter set into motion by the audio from the live musicians, and their movements create windows through which bits of processed materials from the Mozart may be released into physical models of plates, which resonate in response. The actions of the creatures also influence other aspects of the electronics, as well as the generated score guiding the musicians’ improvisations; for instance, when ‘tenticules’ are lost, the plates fluctuate. As the audience in each site sees and hears the interactions of the musicians and the underwater avatars, the shared display reveals what happens as the actions of individuals co-exist in a sea of others’. No live sound is diffused from one site into another, but rather only the electronics produced by the musicians; thus one only hears the consequences of the performance rather than the performance itself.

Adagio pour l’absence is part of a larger project involving kinetics and objects in relation to physical modelling. In the first work in this series, Adagio sans quatuor, suspended instruments – metal plates and two instruments designed by Paul Stapleton – ‘perform’ the Dissonances introduction, in an extremely slow version lasting more than twenty minutes. The sonic properties of the plates are transformed by devices bending the plates, in movements so slow as to be mostly imperceptible, while synthesis according to physical models simulate the same processes for the instruments which cannot actually be bent. In next work of the series, Ainsi le silence, body artist Yann Marussich will interact with the performance of the Adagio by both a live quartet and the instrument-objects of the installation.
- Patricia Alessandrini