piece by Zeena Parkins
Concept and score: Zeena Parkins
Laurent Bruttin (clarinet)
Tony Buck (percussion)
Magda Mayas (piano/keyboard)
Sébastien Roux (electronics) (part III)
Christian Kesten (recorded voice)
Zeena Parkins (harp)
Matthew Ostrowski (sound direction/electronics) (part I and II)
J’ai plus de souvenirs que (I have more memories than) is the name of the new work by composer and performer Zeena Parkins, who was a guest of the DAAD’s Berlin artists’ programme in 2014, and was designed to fill an entire evening. The starting point is Walter Benjamin’s archival legacy of letters, card indexes, images, scribbles, books, wordplays. It is the mnemonics technique used in this archive that Zeena Parkins found fascinating about Benjamin, the invisible thread that holds together and makes sense of the apparent hodgepodge. As a composer and improviser, she researches how colours, numeric games, wordplay and visual structures such as lists, colour codes, strokes can be used as a dispositive of a score in Benjamin’s manuscripts in order to initiate musical processes, develop improvisation strategies and generate an animated sound space via a set of loudspeakers.
Part III, realized by Sébastien Roux, is an electroacoustic version of Part IV for clarinet, keyboard and percussion: