Rebecca Lane & Clara de Asís

As composers and performers, Rebecca Lane and Clara de Asís forego static pieces in favor of elastic systems, seeking work that is context-dependent, ephemeral, and evolving. At Blank Forms, they will perform a new manifestation of “Distances Bending,” their ongoing duo project, with Lane on quarter-tone flutes and de Asís on analog synthesizer. “Distances Bending” is the duo’s way of playing with the basic geometries of harmonics; they begin with a single chord, or sonic object, and take it from low to high as they incorporate increasingly complicated combinations of frequencies, sometimes entering a range where listeners generate their own phantom tones, or moving beyond audibility all together. 

Lane and de Asís view silence as a field of vibrations to be independently activated or articulated. That is, they don’t intrude into silence so much as they make audible what preexists them in a particular space; their environment reflects, reinforces, and sculpts the vibrational patterns they draw out. As they play off of the physical space, they also mirror each other’s instrumentation: The flute attempts to stabilize, to achieve electronic precision, while the synthesizer necessarily adopts the flute’s humanity, as minute anomalies in electrical currents undermine its supposed precision, requiring de Asís to tune it, however finely, by ear. The result is a work in which, first and foremost, Lane and Asís are listening to how the other listens.

Alongside “Distances Bending,” Lane and de Asís will perform an original composition adapted from the visual art of Channa Horwitz (1932–2013), who, like the duo, was interested in how a mathematical pattern, sustained for a sufficiently long duration, can begin to resemble randomness. In Horwitz’s Sonakinatography (Time–Motion–Notation) series, she iterated a sequence of eight colors—from 1, a dark green, to 8, a pale green—over sprawling sheets of graph paper (often up to thirty square feet). In the resulting patterns, the movement of colors over space represents movement over time. By assigning each of those eight colors to eight real-world objects—e.g., sonic frequencies, bodily gestures, or light sources—artists can then interpret Horwitz’s illustrations as notations—e.g., musical scores, studies for choreography, or light installations. Here, Lane and de Asís interpret Horwitz’s Sonakinatography #17 (1987–2004) as a 4-channel rendition for tape, flutes and synthesizer, which shares with “Distances Bending” an interest in sound that rises to an apex and culminates in ecstasy.

Special thanks to Andrew Fenchel at Lampo for making Lane and de Asís’s realization of Sonakinatography #17 possible.