Neil Luck
Real Telepaths
Real Telepaths is a 45 minute performance created and performed with members of Plus Minus Ensemble, Neil Luck, and a group of other musicians. The work is an act of visioning; a central performer, incased in a sound-proof foam cube attempts desperately to bring into alignment a diverse array of voices, instruments, radio signals and images. Questions of communication, personal relations, communal experiences, and imagined futures collate in a telepathic squall, finally (almost) coming into focus as a live accompanied cinematic image.
The work uses music already known by the players individually, reframed within a composed structure to create a performance that is unique to the ensemble. By drawing on the individual musical personalities of all the performers involved, Luck creates a primer, a catalogue, or a kind of lexicon of musical materials (in whatever style they play) based on empirical, abstract, and poetic qualities; key, tempo, weight, emotion, profundity, taste.
The performance is an orchestration of these materials, presenting them collectively, individually, simultaneously, warped and twisted in tempo, character, sentiment, and technique. Threaded together by, and responding to a central spoken monologue, Real Telepaths operates as a piece of instrumental theatre, the core of which is the act of musical performance itself.
Plus Minus and Luck serve as ‘sectional’ leaders for the full ensemble, wrangling this unsteady, blurred, saturated mass of sound into collectively poignant form. The vision for the piece is hypnagogic, wildly dynamic, ‘immersive’, oneiric, dense, complex, and overwhelming.
Performances
- Reid School of Music, Edinburgh, 22 September 2021
- Guildhall School of Music and Drama, 19 October 2021
- University of Southampton, 15 November 2021
- Klangspuren Schwaz, 4 July 2023
Real Telepaths
11:00am Tuesday 4 July 2023
Klangspuren Schwaz
Szentrum Schwaz, Austria
Neil Luck • Real Telepaths
With players from TENM and students from Landesmusikschule Schwaz and Musikgymnasium Innsbruck.
University of Southampton
1:00pm Monday 15 November 2021
Turner Sims
University of Southampton
Neil Luck • Real Telepaths
Festival of Laurence Crane
7:30pm Tuesday 19 October 2021
Milton Court Concert Hall
London
Neil Luck • Real Telepaths
Laurence Crane • Cobbled Section After Cobbled Section (arr.)
Laurence Crane • Octet
Tickets available from the Barbican website. Part of the Festival of Laurence Crane.
Neil Luck on Real Telepaths
Neil Luck and Alice Purton communicated telepathically about his new work for Plus Minus Ensemble.
Tickets available from the Barbican website. Part of the Festival of Laurence Crane.
Reid School of Music 3
7:00pm Wednesday 22 September 2021
Reid Concert Hall
Edinburgh
Neil Luck • Real Telepaths [wp]
Plus-Minus Ensemble is a London based ensemble committed to commissioning new work and placing it alongside recent and landmark modern repertoire.
