Ashley Fure — A Library on Lightning

My work is concerned with ritual abstraction, chaotic matter, and touch. I use tactile, haptic sound to craft fields of intensity that don’t rely on narrative, representation, or text. Estrangement, abstraction, and a visceral materiality are hallmarks of this aesthetic terrain.

My compositional practice shifts regularly from acoustic to electroacoustic contexts and from concert music to expanded intermedia forms. These latter projects weave sound, light, and kinetic matter into charged, multisensory environments that are at once immersive (as in installation art) and temporally sculpted (as in music). I see these wordless rituals feeding a need for modern rites unbound to dogma, ideology, and conversion. To my eyes, we need ritual spaces more than ever to collectively metabolize impending global crises and connect to timescales larger than our own. And yet the rites we’ve inherited are tied to sects and tribes that serve only a sliver of us. My work is angled at this absence, offering ritualized, visceral abstractions that point toward a post-human terrain.

The concert music and intermedia installations I make stand in fractal relation to one another: the former attempts in microform what the latter achieves in macro. In the septet Something to Hunt (2014), for example, I detune the double bass's lowest string until it’s slack enough to slap against the fingerboard when bowed. In The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2017), a player bows an aircraft cable wrapped around a massive block of styrofoam and stretched 65 feet across the immersive installation in which the audience sits. Both gestures produce rich, wild multiphonics and a waveform so slow it’s visible to the naked eye. While in Something to Hunt I alter the identity of the instrument to bring it more concretely into its object body, in The Force of Things the object itself becomes sculptural. One objectifies instruments while the other instrumentalizes objects. Both realms seek to stage vivid aesthetic encounters that, as Francis Bacon once hoped for his paint, bypass the brain and go directly to the nervous system
—Ashley Fure, 2017

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