BRASS #2

BRASS is a ghost orchestra. Three sousaphones play by themselves and appear to be hoovering in space. These automated instruments are part of Verdonck’s larger research into performance after human presence. Maxime Denuc is an electronic music composer, who over the past years worked with computer-controlled church organs as powerful synthesizers. For BRASS #2 he made a new sound piece, based on the principles of circular music. Maxime Denuc is artist in residence with A Two Dogs Company / Kris Verdonck. 

Human emotion and the capacity for abstraction are possibly expressed most powerfully in music and the playing of an instrument. Music is also of the gods, from the heavenly sounds on Mount Olympus to the harmony of the spheres that resounds in the universe. 

BRASS is a ghost orchestra. The three sousaphones play themselves, and appear to be floating. The machines, automated instruments, are the source of the music in a place where man and the gods are no longer around. These sousaphones were developed by Decap, specialists in the creation of automated musical instruments. Their rotating movements create a slow-motion Doppler effect, whereby sounds sometimes come together and then move apart again. In BRASS, Kris Verdonck continues his research into theatre without performers. Given the increasing technologisation of society and the destruction resulting from war and climate change, the possibility of a world without people has never been so likely. The sound nevertheless has human features: breathing, blowing, ‘practising’ and warming up. The instruments are suspended in a dark room, in a perpetuum mobile – their material gleams, but the body they normally rest on is no longer there.