I'm going to write a post-performance offload of the Headfuck piece I did at the IMT on Friday 12 Dec. I attended only two rehearsals, so I started a day later than everyone else and had to be the new person for a while. Soon enough we were all at the same point and the other performers were all very interesting people.
I wrote earlier about the score being rudimentary. I couldn't have been more wrong. It was the most complicated thing I have ever played, but, having said that, after a few rehearsals my brain began to assimilate information in a new way, and I was progressing toward success rather than the perpetual failure of the first attempts.
For just a few minutes afterwards, my ears had a new way of hearing. I was able to discern new sounds amongst the cacophony of urban noises on the bus to the station. The sounds had always been there, but I had become newly aware of their order and sequences as I’d been listening in a different way during the Headfuck rehearsals. This soon faded as my brain assimilated and ignored as usual the wealth of ambient noise.
It was a battle when performing the piece, in the sense that you were trying to listen to certain people (who you needed for triggers) and trying to ignore those you didn’t. Normally one tries to listen to the whole (including oneself) and play your part according to the feel, etc. And we weren’t supposed to be playing ‘with’ each other, but outputting purely what the instructional score dictated. Nevertheless, there were some quite nice moments, in the conventional tuneful sense (although this is not the point).
Having an audience made the duration of the piece contract, we'd been consistently playing it for around 20-30 minutes, I was concentrating so hard each time the minutes passed quickly. They all started shuffling around the ten minute mark and then settled again. Even the performers had difficulty knowing where the end was…but finally there was some applause.
