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Version / Variation

by Sean Dack

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about

The project consists of an audio score played in a 26 channel audio installation with a slab-like bench positioned in the center of the speaker array.

The project is based around Erik Satie’s seminal work Gymnopedie No 1. I have collected and compiled every commercially available version of this short piano piece, each one performed by a different player, and each one having it’s own idiosyncratic personality (timing, background noise, performers interpretation).

I have taken each of these performances and I have arranged them in a multi track audio environment. Additionally I have taken each version and I have stretched out the timing of each track to the total length of a commercially available compact disc (approx 72 minutes). The pitch and tone of this stretching stays the same, only the timing gets slowed down.

What this creates is a slow sonorous ambient environment with roots to the original, but they’ve been smeared out into an impressionistic whole. An underwater-like slow cacophony that is both beautiful and engaging, while becoming something new entirely.

The work is the cumulinative “end-point” for Satie’s original piece, widely considered to be the earliest precursor to modern “ambient” music. Lauded by visionaries like John Cage and used in countless film soundtracks, it is a part of the history of 20th Century Modernism and also a part of our collective unconscious. I take this single work, which has no “original” recording (only interpretations) and transform it into an ultimate ambient environment.

credits

released March 21, 2020

Version / Variation was a part of the Sean Dack solo exhibition "21st Century Dub Dub" at Fitzroy Gallery in 2011.

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Sean Dack New York, New York

Sean Dack is a multidisciplinary artist and musician who works in sound, video, digital imaging, and installation.

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