Glasgow and Paris based Polish composer and audio-visual artist Ela Orleans performs her mesmerising Night Voyager. Set to soaring music featuring live synthesiser, theremin, vocals and violin, Night Voyager features NASA archive footage of the 1969 Apollo moon mission, matching the astronauts’ emotional journey with fragments of Night Thoughts a collection of extended poetic mediations written by Edward Young in 1742.. Rather than a linear re-telling, Orleans performance focuses on the wider meaning of the lunar trip and Young’s exploration of mortality, time and human folly. Although now scarcely remembered, Night Thoughts was called in its time ‘the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced’.
assembling.air from artist-composers Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg treats voice as instrument: snipped phonemes, caught breaths, coos, sighs and sung tones are manipulated and resculpted, forming alien patterns that never quite lose their connection to the human. Addressing the potential for voice based technologies in musical composition, assembling.air pairs a vocal ‘self’ with its ‘clone’ in a dialogue that evolves organically as the performance unfolds. Composition meets text based improvisation in a piece that literally speaks to the future of musical innovation.
This event will last approximately 80 minutes, including an interval.
Ela Orleans performance of Night Voyager is supported by PRS Foundation’s Beyond Borders, a co-commissioning and touring programme run in partnership with Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Wales, Arts Council of Northern Ireland and Arts Council of Ireland /An Chomhairle Ealaíon.
