Joshua Fried: Travelogue
Title:
- Travelogue
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Artist Statement:
In Travelogue the ephemeral nature of live performance and the static nature of recorded technology collide, interact and even become co-dependent. Travelogue is composed for two synchronized audio tape tracks and one live performer. Tape one, the musical accompaniment, is heard only by the audience. Tape two, which contains various vocal sounds, is heard (via headphones) only by the performer. The performer has never heard these sounds before, and yet the performer is asked to imitate exactly what she or he hears on the headphones – with every word and expression intact, and the no lag time whatever. This last requirement makes the task quite impossible and the result produces a bizarre unknown language. A person can perform Travelogue only once.
The title refers to feelings of dislocation, alienation, exhilaration and despair often experienced by travelers – and everyone, else for that matter, at one time or another in their life. Travelogue is not “low-tech” (and patently not “high-tech”), but what one might call “structurally-tech.” By that is meant that fundamental to the composition is an exploration of the technology’s simplest and most basic functions and assumptions.
Travelogue asks, ‘just because multi track recording allow two things to be recorded in synch, must they then always be heard together? AND, can the two-way isolation afforded by the miracle of stereo headphones be used to musical and theatrical effect?”
With Monica Maye, voice & Joshua Fried, text and all instruments
