1992 — electroacoustic
“Eyeless in Gaza” is the title of a well-known novel by Aldous Huxley, who in turn took it from a phrase in John Milton’s Samson Agonistes: “Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves”. The piece does not pretend to have any descriptive or programmatic relation to the novel; the title was essentially chosen by the particular admiration I have always felt for Huxley. But I was also moved by the thought that, at the time of composing the piece, the meaning of Milton’s phrase, so terrible in itself, had taken on additional connotations that neither English writer could have foreseen. The piece was realized in 1992 using the technology typical of the small personal studios of the time: a sampler and a computer as a MIDI sequencer, without any kind of recording or post-processing. Once finished, it can be played in real time on the sampler using the instrument’s internal sequencer. Despite this, certain passages show subtle differences in timbre each time the piece is played, as some parameters are modulated by a random number generator. All the sound material is derived from two very short audio fragments, according to the very limited memory capacity of the devices of the time. They originate from recordings I made with a portable cassette recorder in the streets of Montevideo, and they are very characteristic sounds of the soundscape of that city.
Premiere: 1992-11-12, Goethe Institute, Montevideo.
Released on: después de maracaná