The name of the piece is “Laughing Gas”. It engages the full instrumentation of the Recherche ensemble. For several last years, I have been working a lot with voice due to the collaboration with N’Caged ensemble. I have discovered a lot for myself, for example, the aspects related to how the body makes the vocal sound. For a while, my work with the voices overshadowed the work with the instruments. I had a hard time thinking about how to return to the instrumental ensemble. I can understand how to write for a solo instrument — I work with the musician’s personality here. But the instrumental ensemble, with its erased personalities, is generally a doubtful premise for composing. I discovered a strange door for returning to instrumental ensemble writing: through the feeling of the instruments as strange voices. For example, the human body is in an oboe form. The man is an oboe-body, and he sings (we listen to it as playing on the instrument). There are a lot of things in the instrumental parts of my piece.
I relate the second point to my improvisational practices. It became interesting “to spray” some performative material between the musicians that would be outside the text and notation. Something that improvisation consists of. I guess all improvisation is laughing gas: for some strange reason, people communicate with each other in an unusual language. It seems they have a connection, but it is hard to say about concrete things that work for that. In this score, I sprayed performative clouds, it action in parallel to the notated material. Some speech fragments are here, reactions and pseudo-vocal things that played as an additional layout to the instrumental parts.
