Highways Performance Space Executive Director, Leo Garcia & Artistic Director, Patrick Kennelly Present
Future Travel
David Rosenboom with HEX Trio: Molly Pease, Fahad Siadat & Scott Graff
In our age of technologically induced cognitive somnambulism, the abandonment of conscious awareness to the techno-social networks of the synthetic infosphere, Future Travel is about the poiesis of a positive possible, affirming the power of creative assertion and proactive being, no matter the presence and stresses of global uncertainties.
“Deranged, brilliant and unbelievably prophetic stuff . . .” Boomkat Product Review, June 28, 2024
1982
Pandora’s Cluster
2024
This performance celebrates the expanded reissue of composer-performer David Rosenboom’s classic 1981 journey in sonic imagery, Future Travel, with new music derived from it and performed in combination with his latest score for creative singers, Is Existence Is. The original narrative of Future Travel imagines a spirit being representing the first awareness of a new form of consciousness to which humans evolved after becoming aware of the unstoppable momentum of the course which they had set and the unlikelihood of their surviving. Collaborating with Rosenboom, a scintillating, electrified HEX Trio unfolds this narrative in a dialogue among three personas of the spirit being, interwoven with a seldom-seen film made to accompany the dialogue in 1981 in collaboration with legendary experimental filmmaker, George Manupelli. Future Travel is also the first major composition created with Touché, a radical approach to an electronic keyboard instrument resulting from a 1979-80 design collaboration of Rosenboom with Donald Buchla. A software-based successor called Touché II is heard in this concert. In combination, Is Existence Is arises from reflections on facts and philosophies of existence: concurrent complexities linking inside with outside; places, locations and times of individual and other; and the resplendent emergence of pure spirit. Text modules, images, and sounds combine and recombine like philosophical DNA, as the HEX Trio navigates many possible pathways through notated materials, while their resplendent voices activate banks of ringing electronic resonators tuned to the work’s unique harmonic architecture.
Black Truffle Records @ Bandcamp
HEX website.
Molly Pease
Fahad Siadat
Scott Graff
D. Rosenboom & G. Manupelli
Burning toy piano from film
David Rosenboom
“. . . Future Travel is a time capsule of radical imaginings at the birth of our digital age, reminding us of utopian possibilities of which our own present seems so offen to fall short.” Francis Plagne, Black Truffle Records, Press Release, June 21, 2024
Acknowledgment: An initial outreach for an event at Highways Performance Space was submitted by Anastasia Chernysheva.