This Instrument

2020


Performance / Improvisation Online

Collaboration with Aisha Orazbayeva

Images: © Tim Etchells

Realised as part of Wiener Festwochen 2020 reframed season, This Instrument is an atmospheric music-and-text collaboration by Tim Etchells (voice) and Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) realised over Zoom between UK and France.

In this fragmentary 25-minute composition Etchells draws on diverse text materials, mixing and combining them live in relation to Orazbayeva’s recorded violin material. Both artists explore loose structures of repetition and variation, fluctuating the intensity and texture of voice and violin alike in order to bring about unexpected changes, escalations and transformations of their material. Disturbing but strangely compelling, Etchells’ text at the heart of the piece returns repeatedly to the idea of an instrument, whose precise nature is left unexplained, but which seems designed to measure, speak to or even sing about aspects of human experience.