"We have achieved two of the three alchemists' dreams: We have transmuted the elements and learned to fly. Immortality is next." Max More, On becoming posthuman.
Vega's digital language covers the spectrum between noise and pure sine. Using this sound world, Vega writes music in block gestures that can be described as micro-minimal with a passion towards machine-kind.
The songs strip down with the ideas of lyrical lines, replacing them with automatic instruments triggered to match an equally automatic vocal part. Inspired by Spiegel's voice, each score in the Wormsongs is motivated in part by social evolution.
The composed music combs the centuries for a language to express this theme, touching often on practices such as religious intoning and spoken-word. These practices are internalized to create an original vocal and computer language that drives this book of songs and its message.
The Wormsongs
Light code
Sermon on files and vile springs *
Sleep
Breath
Do not **
Dear Mother Nature
She Burns "Round Red *
The Infinite Land
Machines of Moisture
The Autotelic
Sermon on wings and tergal lobes ***
Solar Set
Set Song
Orbit Correction
Orbit Dynamics
text by Henry Vega except:
* based on text by Georg Hobmeier
** text by Maria del Carmen Montoya
*** based on text by Marco Molling
In this book the voices presence is felt throughout the performance although with differing roles, discovering a slightly different character and degree of meaning to the voice in each song. Sometimes the level of meaning can be direct as with "Do Not" where Montoya's text reads out like a guidebook of unsaid rules of engagement. In Hobmeier's "Sermon on files and vile springs" a processed reading of the text begins the piece to allow a slow unraveling of each word while it is being read at a very fast pace; half way through the piece the pure unedited text is blasted to the audience. The oposite can be said of the opening song "Light Code" where the voice is heard pulsating as it anounces the genesis of the worm analogy to man.
