Let's pick up where we left off..
STEFAN PRINS: GENERATION KILL
Chill-seekers searching for over the top, multi-media terror need look no further than Belgian composer Stefan Prins' "Generation Kill." You might want to dust off the old projector screen and let this video roll. Composed in 2012 in dedication to the Nadar Ensemble, Prins' "Kill" is as horrifying to watch as it is hear. This avant-garde production calls for "percussion, e-guitar, violin, violoncello, 4 musicians with game controllers, live-electronics & live-video," leading to an eerie cacophony of bizarre audio and visual effects that appear as though they were sliced straight out of a horror film.
What is truly eerie about this piece lay in it's underlying theme: who is running the show? Those at the control deck? The musicians themselves? Are they performing live, or are they hollow shells, previously filmed in an unknown, discreet location? Prins intentionally left the answers to these questions lurking within the dark abyss of ambiguity.
GYÖRGY LIGETI: VOLUMINA (EPILOGUE)
Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti's "Volumina" for organ opens with a blood-curdling behemoth of dissonant tones that could make even Beelzebub's blood boil.
The devilishly dynamic cluster of sound is produced by the forearms of the organist, which Ligeti instructs must lay across an entire manual, with all of the instrument's stops pulled out. This shocking work initially proved too horrific even for the organ itself: whilst practicing the piece on Sweden's Göteborg organ in 1962, the over-strained instrument caught fire, leading to a cancellation of the work's scheduled premiere (once the church council at Bremen - where the live performance was scheduled to take place - caught wind of the organ's curious self-immolation.) Volumina would not hold its debut until the Spring of that year, and even then, only in the form of a pre-taped recording of a live performance.
