@work
The piece I'm working on right now is called Seconds of Salvation. It's going to be premiered at the Lab on December 9 with The Life On Earth playing also. Here's the official blurb (thanks Mitch!):
In Seconds of Salvation Schrock finds the underlying essence of musical redemption in various songs about hope and higher powers from different cultures and ideologies by first hacking those tunes to microscopic bleeps, next rearranging the shards, then fusing them into a new inorganic whole and finally realigning the synthetic and the natural. If that doesn't happen, it'll be really nifty anyway.
I think every culture produces songs of salvation, even those that are highly secular. This whole project came to mind when listening to Laurie Anderson's O Superman a few weeks ago, and realizing that the song is about salvation, resignation, and redemption through a higher power, in this case, science. I think the effect on the secular listener is the same as when a farmer in Tibbee, Mississippi listens to the repetitive chants of the local gospel choir. And even if this is all sociologically inaccurate, it's a provocative theory to help prod some interesting sound work out of me and my 15" electronic music box.