Multivocal by Jessica Ekomane

Multivocal is a polyphonic maze that unfolds to both the body and the mind. A generative take on rhythm and spacial perception, it presents the same events in different configurations.

The two pieces of the album, "Solid of Revolution" and "Never Odd or Even", mirror each other with the same principle in different musical scales: steady pulses with one millisecond difference in tempo start beating together, then slowly phase organically and progress into ever-changing rhythmic patterns until they finally return to unison.

Multivocal emphasizes shifts of attention in the listener’s experience and plays with the expectations that frame it. Originally conceived for quadraphonic sound, the pieces reveal the many different aspects and modes of perception that can arise within the same sequence of notes. In this way Multivocal is influenced by concepts of gestalt psychology such as multistable perception - a term describing ambiguous patterns that offer multiple interpretations at once. The minimalism and repetitive quality of the music also refers to trance-inducing and collective music practices, driven by the strong bodily affects induced through the use of rhythms.

Those two compositions were recorded live during Ars Electronica 2018 at the occasion of the sleeping event « Sonatas for Sleep/less », curated by multimedia artist Shu Lea Cheang and cultural theorist Matthew Fuller.

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