text to 5
“Alter ego” was the negative copy of the simultaneously created “Absinth”.
At that time, there was a lot of discussion in The Hague about aesthetics, about what one could do or not do, and I was dying to make a piece in which everything was ‘not done’.
An improper form, ragged material etc.
The material consisted of faulty feedback loops, rough tone generator experiments, deteriorated cassette tapes with radio-recordings, whispers from Carmen, my former girlfriend, screeching taperecorders, feedbacked silence, scraps of phone conversations, 78-rpm records, and a lot more…
It’s written in a derailed sonata form with soft radio noise as a theme. As prescribed, the exposition is repeated, then repeated again badly and the development gets out of hand completely and ends up in a Rina Ketty song on a 78-rpm record, processed through the Vocoder.
The première coincided with premières by Phillippi and Billinger, with whom I had founded the Elektrisch Ensemble. The E.E. existed briefly: after a collective work: ‘Object’, and a performance of Ferneyhough’s ‘Time & Motion-study no. 2’ together with Frances-Marie Uitti, we each went our separate ways.