Speak Percussion - The Great Knot

Speak performs Thomas Meadowcroft's The Great Knot, for percussion trio, electronics and playback.

Performed for the 2013 MaerzMusik Festival at the Haus Der Berliner Festspiele.

Performers: Eugene Ughetti (Artistic Director), Matthias Schack-Arnott & Leah Scholes

Thomas says of the piece:

"The Great Knot is based on the migratory patterns of the
bird, 'The Great Knot'. This species breeds in Siberia in the Summer but
heads to Australia and Southern Asia during the Northern Winter. (The
Great Knot is also sometimes vagrant in Europe, although whether this
is by accident or providence, one cannot be sure.) A distance that is
for us a longhaul flight, the bird makes its trip with only one stopover. The
Great Knot is now considered vulnerable as a species due to a combination
of factors, not only in part due to the reclamation of the birds'stopover
grounds between Siberia and the South Seas (namely, mud flats in South
Korea). Furthermore, given its strange 'international' status -- that is its
territory is not fixed to a specific nation state --
the bird is difficult to protect. In these ways, Great Knots
are birds without passports, so to speak, and are without anywhere to land.

The Great Knot attempts to approach the event horizon
of the species' extinction with a kind of perverted joy. It does this
if not to bring about some minor attention to these international
travellers, then at least to attempt to suspend the tragedy attached
with the demise of these birds by using their flight paths as a model
for music composition (namely "how to get from A to B".)"

[machida]

so hard electric sound for me to lidten to ...

[peepeepoopoo]

Came back to say I shared this with friends and it is still fucking garbage