Jon McGregor commissioned me write some music to accompany his live readings on the book tour for Reservoir 13, as well as coming up with a way that this could be played without any musicians or audio equipment.
This is the concept we developed:
Since each phone would potentially take longer to load audio than others depending on signal and memory, I re-wrote the music with Haiku Salut, which we performed in a more ambient way that didn’t rely on the instruments being exactly in sync.
Different strands of the music play from different phones at different times as McGregor reads and controls the music from his phone. The sound moves amongst and around and between us. Sometimes just one repetitive jingling noise is loud in your lap and sometimes there are only plaintive wisps from behind you. It is gentle and lovely. This performance inverts that private act in a public venue but evokes similar questions about the internal worlds we carry into the public domain.