Bryan Eubanks: Object V

Thursday, November 30th, ISSUE is pleased to premiere Berlin-based composer Bryan Eubanks’ “Object V” and composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies' “Contralto,” two new works employing unique compositional strategies.

Bryan Eubanks’ “Object V” is a new composition for viola, clave, metal plate feedback system, electronic samples, and Digital Signal Processing. Performed by Eubanks and Catherine Lamb (viola), “Object V” is part of a series of solo electroacoustic works which began as a way to explore what is possible with a limited set of materials placed in a simple frame or grid. The intention of the grid, beyond an exercise in simplicity or minimalism, is to exhaust what might be construed as form: a framework that collapses musical structure into its most basic archetypes of superposition, seriality and repetition of both similar and contrasting elements. Since the material is limited, the variation comes from these interactions, and what might result from this is a more literal experience of the materials themselves, and subsequently the composition. Rather than attempting to evoke subjective phenomena, the Object series functions obliquely as it alienates its component materials in the (repeated) moment of hearing. In seeking to minimize the stylistic mediation of the materials, the pieces present the sonic artifacts of the impossibility of non-mediation.

The work originated at a residency at EMS in Stockholm in the winter of 2014 where Eubanks was left with hundreds of fragments of feedback from the studio's Buchla and Serge synthesizers. With no concrete idea what to do with these materials, they became the building blocks for this exploration of formlessness. Since then, a produced body of compositions has expanded to include four solo electro-acoustic works, one studio realization, two works for ensemble, this duo, and an installation for one viewer at a time.