Knots

When I first read Knots, the 1970 work by the English psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing, in a single day, I was left in a state of excited confusion and intellectual infection.
After an incubation period of seven years, I began working on a musical realization of the text in 2014. I was particularly interested in the tension between the highly direct, deeply emotional content and the very strict, almost mathematically constructed structure of the text. It deals with “classic” psychological themes: fear, desire, the pursuit of power, and self(contempt). The verses, labyrinthine in nature, trace the twists and turns of everyday thought streams and inner monologues, simultaneously exaggerating them and transforming them through extreme, permutative logic.
It was my compositional intention to explore this tension from varying perspectives in the music. The inner monologues are incorporated into the music through sample recordings, to which the instrumental trio interacts in various ways. At times, the music dissects the absurd mental labyrinths on a sonic-phonetic level; at other moments, it forms a breathlessly panting, rhythmic web of ever-newly combined fragments of thoughts. And at times, the disembodied voice and instrumental sound merge into a spherical, internal lament.