Highlights from the world premiere of the 45 minute multimedia work for piano, electronics, two videos, and MiMU sensor gloves, co-created with Neil Luck
Whatever Weighs You Down – highlights from the debut performance of which are edited together here for the first time – is one of many compositions produced by Cyborg Soloists, an interdisciplinary UKRI-funded research hub based at Royal Holloway University, London, where composer, pianist and technologist Zubin Kanga is the principal investigator. The multimedia work, co-created with Neil Luck, explores “seemingly immovable objects (physical, musical, and semantic).” Alongside Deaf performance artist Chisato Minamimura, who appears onscreen, Kanga performs Luck's arrangement for piano, voice and MiMU glove technology, aiming to “pull apart the audio-visual contract of the musical stage.”
This method incorporating technological devices into performance as well as composition has become somewhat of an ethos for the Cyborg Soloists. “A lot of [the works] are about the effect on the body, and also about the audience’s empathetic way of looking at what’s happening,” says Kanga, speaking to Emily Bick in The Wire 466. “In a lot of very traditional electroacoustic music, often there’s someone behind the laptop and an instrumentalist, and there might be something very sophisticated happening, but it’s very hard for the audience to really gauge what that is – it’s hidden. It’s all about the end result and not about the process,” he explains. “A lot of these devices are about bringing the audience into the process – about making the process of controlling the electronics quite theatrical.”
Whatever Weighs You Down was premiered at Gaudeamus Festival, 11 September 2022.
Read more about Zubin Kanga and Cyborg Soloists in The Wire 466. Subscribers can also read the magazine online via the digital library.
