Rudi Arapahoe: A False Memory of a Sports Party
Rudi Arapahoe
There aren't many composers who would think to draw inspiration from pioneering memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, but then again there aren't many composers with the imagination and original sensibility of Rudi Arapahoe. Loftus's groundbreaking work has explored memory distortion and the propagation of false memories; Arapahoe applies her ideas to his latest work by weaving voices into the musical design that recount memories from a sports party, recollections of traumatic experiences that might be accurate or distorted. This isn't the first time, incidentally, the English composer has tilled such fertile ground: issues of identity and duality informed 2012's Double Bind (which drew for inspiration from the writings of Gregory Bateson and R.D. Laing) and 2016's False Self, too.
That ‘false' notion isn't only present conceptually or in the form of voice samples either. Arapahoe's again working with his custom-designed ‘False Self' program, which he created using the SuperCollider programming language. In essence, the program operates as an algorithmic musician capable of composing and playing alongside the composer in real time. Further to that, non-vocal sounds in the five pieces were sourced from early digital instruments used for synthesizing and sampling acoustic instruments, making for a counterfeit sound that's more simulacrum than real thing. A generative character is also present, such that each piece feels as if it could carry on for hours on end were it part of a gallery installation based on the false memory topic.
Musically, the slow-moving, ponderous pieces exude a synthetic quality that's both ethereal, ominous, and surreal. Low- and high-pitched synthesizer tones imbue the material with a smooth plastic sheen reminiscent of the ‘80s and ‘90s, while the voices are often blurred by various treatments, making their utterances sometimes difficult to decipher and adding to the unreliability of the reportage. Strengthening the New Age dimension, tinkling percussion sometimes accompanies the voices, making the content of what's said even harder to make out. Yet even when that's so, the emotion in the speaker's voices comes through, whether it be an expression of anguish, resignation, or despair. During “Sports Party,” for example, the repeated utterance “Can't find a way, a way out” becomes a chilling signifier for the psychological straitjackets we wrap ourselves in.
Interestingly, A False Memory of a Sports Party is, in many respects, a natural companion piece to Todd Haynes' 1995 film Safe. Not only do both deal in different ways with the disintegration of the self, musically Ed Tomney's score plays like some lost sibling to Arapahoe's. In fact, were one to strip the voices out of the five pieces, one could imagine them a fitting match for Haynes' film.
It would be understating it to say that, in physical terms, A False Memory of a Sports Party is unlike most other releases. In its total form, it comes with a large, poster-sized fine art print (imagine the cover writ large) and what at first glance appears to be a cassette but is, in fact, a cartridge housing a USB stick. Such sleight-of-hand is in keeping, of course, with notions of unreliability and deception that are at the very core of the project.July 2018