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
