Flute or cello

Guitar 

Sampler keyboard 

Percussion 

About the work:

Influenced by Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of de-familiarisation, ctrl+Y aims to twist common aspects of everyday life, making them strange and uncanny to refresh and challenge our perspectives on the familiar.

A ubiquitous part of our mediated daily lives, the QWERTY keyboard sits at the centre of the work. The keyboard’s inherent, expressive musical potential is unveiled through the amplification and filtering of key presses, the translation of its data stream into frequency information, fed to synthesisers, and its recasting as a sampler instrument that triggers recordings of personal interviews with the performers, as well as their instrumental playing. ctrl+Y explores repetition involved in the everyday activities of the ensemble, and repetition as a vehicle to build cognitive and motoric fluency over time. The fluency here pertains to learning and speaking a foreign language, playing their instruments, and communicating by typing at a computer keyboard. The assimilation of instrumental practice with common, repetitive tasks such as admin-driven typing hints at the inseparability of music from everyday experience.

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Created with support from KODA Kultur and Dansk Komponist Forening