When the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean
Microtonality, Occultism, and Electrical Force in Early Modern America
A speculative fiction project devised with TAK Ensemble
live recording from first performance at Roulette Intermedium. May 21, 2024.
program designed by Ben Wallen. Click here for full PDF.
AbouT
when the great fires were lit on the other side of the ocean is a performance project engaging with the legacies of early scientific modernity and their relationships to experimental sound practices and archival preservation. Borrowing its title from the psychogeographical excursions of W.G. Sebald, when the great fires… takes its own journey through real and imagined histories of electricity, using myriad perspectives and mythologies around electrical force to re-enchant its ubiquitous presence throughout American industrial, spiritual, and vernacular narratives. The work posits an “almost-could-have-happened” scenario set in North America around the turn of the 20th century: when electricity, the very force that undergirds our current digitized reality, remained mysteriously nascent in a space of imagination and experimentation as a new unwieldy, yet magical phenomenon.
Fantastical philosophies and prophecies around electricity were central to the belief systems of early sound recording luminaries, eschatological prophecies of the Spiritualists, and complex political players crucial to the founding of our current age. This particular era and its manifold perspectives about this new “endless” source of power allowed individuals from a wide array of social strata to explore their visions and fears of the immanent modernity – a time of intense introspection on the precipice of a fundamentally changing world.
This performance was introduced by Toronto-based musicologist A. Gilbert Williamson, using earlier work by Timothy Smithson Grant.
Click on the above image for a full transcription of the article (with bibliography).
Nikola Tesla in his laboratory [ca. 1899]
Digitization of 78rpm record from Harry Smith’s personal field recording collection. Singer Bríd Ní Máille came from a lineage of bean caointe (keening/crying women) in County Mayo. A man once said, upon hearing her voice at a wake, that he felt Fuacht na n-iasc ag rith tríd mo chroí - The cold of the fish running through my heart.
Two wax cylinders of early Spiritualist shape note hymnody; recovered from the estate sale of Hélène Thomas Andersen; digitized in 2023 via University at Buffalo Special Collections.
Recorded at St. Mary’s of the Cataract; Niagara Falls, NY. (ca. 1906-1909) \\ Vocalists: Alice Harlow, Philippe Marie Ledesvé, Rev. Eugene Charles Smith III
This piece was made possible by a grant from the Fromm Foundation, with additional support from New Music USA’s Creator Fund and Humanities NY.
