Ben Araujo
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When it comes to literature, one novel that has really stuck with me is The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, simply because it led me down a rabbit hole the likes of which I've never experienced with any other book. The novel concerns a man named Toru Okada, a man who is looking for his missing cat, but eventually his wife goes missing as well, and everything starts to become even stranger from there.
At several points in the novel, Toru goes down to the bottom of a disused well near his apartment, and does so to think as well as escape his conscious and probe the depths of his mind. This well ends up giving Toru access to a dream-like world, an alternate reality of sorts. It is this well, and the alternate reality that it gives Toru access to, that I wanted to capture in this piece, with the flautist interacting with the space around them, triggering accumulating layers of electronics, as if the flautist were playing in a kind of resonant space, like a deep well, with the electronic sounds that mirror the soloist existing beyond recognition, uncanny shadows of what they once were.
Premiered on May 9, 2024 by Marley Dyer in the Performance Hall of the Royal College of Music, London, as part of the Contemporary Music in Action showcase