The UK artist tells a surreal travel narrative through modern composition and prog
Four Assignments is a collaboration between composer Max Syedtollan and the Plus-Minus Ensemble. Starting life as a video piece featuring a series of slides, the audio has recently been released as a cassette by Glasgow tape label GLARC and there are now plans to adapt the work for live performance.
Syedtollan built his narrative – which remarks on national myth-making and colonialism – by embarking on random, accumulative journeys through search engines and online maps: “I used various aleatoric processes to generate text material, one of which was just pressing the random article button on Wikipedia until I had a huge list of topics, which I would then research and find ways that they were connected,” Syedtollan explains to Stewart Smith in The Wire 454. “Quite a lot of the stuff that I came across relates to places, so I’d stage little re-enactments of movements through those places through Google Street View. And then through those processes you acquire various other things.”
Max Syedtollan/Plus-Minus Ensemble's Four Assignments & Other Pieces is available via GLARC. You can find information about upcoming live dates here.
Read Syedtollan's Wire interview in full in The Wire 454. Subscribers can also read the article online via the digital archive.
