Op. 21 Inner Experience Fellowship / Friends of Crime at R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick House

 

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Scott Benzel, Op. 21: Inner Experience Fellowship / Friends of Crime for prepared piano, electronics, guitar,  percussion, tape loop, gong, and central mixing station. R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick- Leland House, August 1, 2015. Presented by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture

Performers: Corey Fogel, percussion; Motoko Honda, prepared piano; Clif Taylor, guitar; Lewis Pesakov, electronics; Harisant, Gong; Scott Benzel; mix, tape loops, composition

http://makcenter.org/programming/scott-benzel/

 

“…in their activities as logothetes, our authors, it seems, have each had recourse to the same operations…The first is self-isolation. The new language must arise from a material vacuum…Loyola requires retreat; no sound, little light, solitude; Sade shuts his libertines up in inviolable places, Fourier decrees the dispersal of libraries…

The second operation is articulation. No languages without distinct signs. Fourier divides mankind into 1629 fixed passions, combinable but not transformable; Sade distributes ejaculation like the words in a sentence…Loyola cuts up the body as he cuts up the Christian narrative…our three authors deduct, combine, arrange, endlessly produce rules of assemblage; they substitute syntax, composition…for creation.

The third operation is ordering…to subject the vast erotic, eudaemonist, or mystical sequence to a higher order…the new discourse is provided with an Ordainer, a Master of Ceremonies… in Ignatius, it is the retreat director, in Fourier some patron or matron, in Sade, some libertine who sets up the postures and directs the over-all progress of the erotic operation; there is always someone to regulate the exercise, séance, orgy, but that someone is not a subject; the producer of the episode, he acts only for the moment…an operator of the sequence. Thus the ritual demanded by our three authors is only a form of planning: it is the order necessary for pleasure, happiness, divine interlocution…but this economy is not appropriative, it remains “excessive”. “

– Roland Barthes, Sade Fourier Loyola

Self-isolation, articulation, ordering, All elements of the time-honored Los Angeles tradition of a group isolating themselves in a house (usually in the Hollywood Hills), and using the environment as an incubator for the above-mentioned articulations, for the ordering of their ‘exercises, séances’, and sound. In Op. 21,: Inner Experience Fellowship / Friends of Crime, R.M. Schindler’s Fitzpatrick/Leland house becomes both incubator and generator of an ‘allover’ soundwork.