“At the ninth annual Outsound New Music Summit, as Martha Colburn’s monsters reeled on the screen and Thollem McDonas improvised feverishly on the piano, I was reminded of both Slavoj Žižek’s speaking of voices as foreign to the our bodies in the context of The Exorcist and of a scene from my childhood in Guayaquil, Ecuador—a long forgotten scene in which my aunt Ana tried to exorcise a relative—and because for years I’d been attending performances like this as a way to exist in an alien planet of thought where new patterns of associations might allow me to approach prose differently, the next morning I inserted both The Exorcist and the forgotten scene of childhood into a chapter in progress, a chapter where the planets merged and the exorcisms blended. A concert hall with unfamiliar progressions—Cage, Messiaen, Ligeti—is fertile space for interplanetary associations. Ask yourself: What are the conditions of contemplation to exist in an alien planet?”
—Mauro Javier Cardenas, author of The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press, 2016)
Photo credit: Victoria Smith