Manifestoon

from manifestar (Old Occitan, 13th c.) “to reveal,”
and festoon (French, c. 1686) “a chain or garland of flowers suspended between 2 points”

// version 1, 2021-01-05.
These were the ideal guidelines in place for creating the album Dangle Statement. The manifestoon will change as needed to reflect further intra-actions.

Do’s:

1. Embrace contrasts
2. Find unexpected sources of propulsion and kinetic energy
3. Be scarce, embrace pauses + silences: mind the gap
4. Work quickly, and commit early to artistic decisions
5. Performances of synthesis and editing
   both manifestooning gestures or abstractions

Dont’s:

1. Don’t use samples from other peoples’ recordings, including sample libraries and generic reverb impulse responses
2. Avoid rounded binary, ternary and arch formal structures:
   form is not an afterthought
3. Avoid stereotypically recognizable parts, such as “drums”, “pad”, “lead” 
4. Don’t use presets for plugins or digital instruments
5. No 12-tet melodies: we tamper our music, we don’t temper it
6. No 2/4 or 4/4 rhythms, we don’t want to bore the machines
7. No steady clocks (“momma heartbeat” — Captain Beefheart)

Intra-actions:

1. Pieces make audible Karen Barad’s theory of posthumanist performativity
   and the concept of intra-action
2. Every piece explores the intra-action between two performances:
   one by each artist
3. Any “object” can become an instrument
   if you listen carefully (aural intra-action)

Inspirations:

1. Our own available light photography of the world “as it is,” where we take an anti-pastoralist and anti-futurist approach to visualizing “revealed nature” in its many forms
2. Absurdist sound art / video art