Distant Pairs: Lucy Railton & Max Eilbacher - Indifferent Rocks are Rearranged into a Dam (Remote Recording)

Notes from Lucy Railton & Max Eilbacher

Indifferent Rocks Are Rearranged into a Dam takes various - and sometimes competing - understandings of “Interval”, “isolation” and “distance” as its point of conceptual and compositional departure. Taking its title from a line in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain, Indifferent Rocks… explores different forms of detachment and abstraction present both in the piece’s making, as well as the post-pandemic cultural environment in which it was composed. We were interested in the perceptual limit of comprehending distances both social and musical: between speakers in a room; between partials; between attacks and isolated electronic tones; between virtuosity and fixed media; between performance separated by an ocean to its playback.

The tonal breadth of Lucy’s cello spectra was analyzed and digitally resynthesized as a collection of partials. For the initial analysis process, cello passages of quick fluctuating pitch were chosen. We wanted to break down and approach the sonorous materiality of the cello as a non-musical object. 

By breaking down the cello into indifferent materials -only to then rearrange and mimic its musical gestures, we wanted to see how meaning can be divested and then reimbued, with an ear to questioning that precise process of “reconstruction” of meaning: just as rocks are indifferent to containing and holding water “for us” until they have been placed into the configuration of a dam. 

By focusing on the minutiae of the sound - “zooming in” - the spectral gaze renders the cello as raw inharmonic material. From these collected pitch sets, the distance between each frequency was calculated to construct a harmonic system by which sound was synthesized. At that point, what form could be given to arrange these static tones, to give them life: does that life require re-approximating the sound of its source, a kind of mimicry of cello as “authentic” source, or is there another kind of life that can be wrenched from these soundings? In oscillating between these two poles we hoped to reframe the listeners’ relationship with a pitched instrument. We wanted to tease the boundaries through which the cello becomes experienced. The simplified synthetic tones, intervallicaly arranged against Lucy’s cello parts are the means by which the distance between cello, synthesis, and sonic meaning are ascribed significance. 

Since we were already preoccupied with the uncanny distances between source and output, original and resynthesized mimic - the reductions and slips required in bridging that distance - we felt it suitable to document the multi-channel piece via a simple recording of the abstracted aural gaze of others. Four speakers become two ears, a multi-channel field is reduced to stereo and multiple perceiving bodies in the Fridman Gallery are now simply the back’s of heads, watched by two eyes on a screen.

Railton and Eilbacher were first paired together in 2020 for an inaugural split release on Edition’s Mego Portraits GRM, a label solely focusing on the release of recent musical pieces created for and commissioned by the Groupe de Recherches Musicale in France. Their new work for Distant Pairs will be their first collaboration and will continue in the territories of sonic engagement heard on their 2020 release, incorporating and intertwining cello and custom digital synthesis methods.

Lucy Railton is a cellist and composer based in Berlin and London focused on improvisation, contemporary and electronic music, field recording and psychoacoustics. She has released her own music on Modern Love, Editions Mego - GRM Portraits, PAN (with Peter Zinovieff), Takuroku and SN Variations (with Kit Downes) and has toured internationally as a solo performer or in collaboration with artists from a range of disciplines, most recently Rebecca Salvadori, Farida Amadou, Catherine Lamb, Kali Malone, Khyam Allami and Stephen O’Malley. As a cellist she has been involved in projects lead by Pauline Oliveros, Iancu Dumitrescu, Mary Jane Leach and Philippe Parreno and has worked with the Tate Modern (Fluxus Long Weekend), Institute of Contemporary Art, London (Kammer Klang) and Blank Forms, New York (Henning Christiansen retrospective) and in 2018 was associate composer with the UK theater producers Complicité for the work Everything that rises must dance, a co-creation with choregrapher Sasha Milavic Davies and 200 female participants. Currently she is involved in the presentation of works by Maryanne Amacher, Iannis Xenakis and Morton Feldman and her engagement with this repertoire has occasioned extensive explorations of resonance, psychoacoustics, synthesis and microtonality, preoccupations that are ever present in her own work. Lucy also established the 10 year long new music series Kammer Klang at Cafe Oto, London and co-founded and co-directed the London Contemporary Music Festival from 2013-2016.

Max Eilbacher works with sound. That work materializes in a variety of forms; compositions, musical performances, conceptual systems, perceptual choreography, installations, and theoretical sculpture. No matter how the final work may be categorized, the art typically utilizes speakers and sound waves. A frequent concern throughout the works is an inquiry into the inextricable and complex relationship between sound and experience. At each incident of sound, a phenomenological abyss must be transversed. He is aware the listener is the agent taking such a leap. Composition (or whatever may be emanating from a speaker) is the practical enactment of such a leap. Originally from Baltimore Maryland, he has very recently relocated to Berlin. In his undergraduate studies in Baltimore, he completed a major in cinematic arts with a minor in computer music and animation, all while maintaining an active touring schedule with a diverse range of projects, including the musical group Horse Lords, whose just intonation-based trance music exemplifies a modern response to the minimalist tradition. Throughout these different projects, what is apparent is an arrangement and an intention of sounds that explore the capacity of structure, timing, and detail to pinpoint the elusive meeting place of the perception of form. Interested in the role of acoustics in the sonic assemblage of the social, political, and physical, he draws from a diverse tradition and practice of sound, musical composition, and artistic creation. He has presented solo compositions, abstracted electronic mediums, and performed with a number of different groups throughout North America, Canada, Europe, and Japan.