leescottnewcombe

 

Empherion takes its title from the 19th century poet John Clare’s term for something short lived, such as the butterfly or the moth. However, when dealing with eternity, this short lived ‘something’ could quite easily be understood as humanity itself.

 

The work is presented on the diapason, a distinctive, sculptural instrument designed to be sounded by four performers simultaneously. Featuring 54 glasses, all with individual frequencies resonating within a one-octave pitch space, a sound world is created that infuses the environment with pulsing psychoacoustics in continual motion. 

 

The sonic clarity fused with the delicate timbre of sustained glass dissolves boundaries between consonance and dissonance, enriching a state of indeterminacy through the interactions of the shifting densities of clustered pitch.

 

Visitors who witness Empherion will embark on personal journeys with the sonic flux. Free to move around the immersive environment, they can get up close to the diapason to experience the unfamiliar and immediate physical effects formed from the narrow striations of pitch space. Sonics infuse, oscillate, and reflect off bodily surfaces.

 

Its eternally recurring perpetual nature creates a dwelling space with the sensorial effect of emitting its own presence among us. A corporeal temporal entity that is at once both endlessly searching and resolutely in stasis. 

 

The performers become guardians of the entity, undertaking a ritualistic task that can unburden the soul. Through sustained concentration towards the cause, they work harmoniously, handing over duties and taking turns to alleviate the fatigue of sounding the ongoing continuum.

 

Empherion is abundant with beauty. It has a truth, a transcendence, a temptation, a seduction, but it is also equally demanding and all consuming. The work dictates its motion be maintained, and the prolongation of life at any cost is the preeminent value. 

 

With its ceaseless drive to exist, to end is an impossibility as the procession relentlessly insists on its own self-satisfying progress. True to all things in life, Empherion attempts to balance the positive and the negative. One cannot exist without the other.

 

Presented as a medium to develop alternative notions of temporality, enrich given modes of perception, and intensify what it might mean to be contemporaneous to one’s present. It brings into play a mode of experiencing and conceptualizing motion that is fundamentally at odds with the intoxicating visions of acceleration.

 

Empherion offers time and space to alleviate our ever-growing crisis of temporal fragmentation, asking visitors to pause in precious contemplation to reclaim notions of duration and vastness.

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