A string quartet dress in wet suits, sitting on chairs on the dry sea-bed in Dublin Bay. They perform a theme and variations (improvised from a set of instructions) as the tide begins to rush in around them. The performance ends for each musician only when the water reaches their neck, making it a durational piece reliant on the speed of the tide. Afterwards, the saturated instruments will be retrieved and the composer will attempt to save them by leaving them to dry naturally. This process will also be recorded and shown on this website. Unsalvageable parts will be repaired using driftwood, and the piece will be performed again next year.

A typist transcribes texts contained in a Fluxkit into musical notation, which is displayed to performers (and audience). The music notation, along with the typed text, is then used as a framework for improvising by a group of performers. 



To play this piece, you also need to get or make a Fluxkit. A Fluxkit is a collection of event scores stored in a container (e.g. Water Yam by George Brecht). I made the piece with the Fluxkits Kirkos created in 2016 in mind, and used one of these to play the premiere. If you don’t have access to a Fluxkit, you could make one, for example by cutting up parts of the Fluxus Workbook (freely available online e.g. on the Monoskop website) and placing them in a box.

The first performance of this piece was played by Lina Andonovska, Hannah Miller, Adam Collins and Yseult Cooper Stockdale (as Kirkos) on 25.06.24 as part of an Irish Composers’ Collective concert in Unit 44, Dublin. I was the typist for the performance.

The software used for this performance (ChatMusic) is currently only available by request. Please get in touch if you're interested.

Circum is an experiment in creating a silent, animated score: the visual element is supposed to be visible both to the performers and the audience and it acts as the entire "text" for the performers. For the musicians, the video inspires them to create sound, generating a feedback loop where their actions are affected both by the video and the sonic choices they have already made. For the audience, however, sound and sight unfold simultaneously. Circum is also my first attempt as an Irish artist to get into the world of James Joyce - probably the most important Irish artist? My transitions, which sit between pieces focused on specific episodes of Ulysses, transverse the entire text (backwards) in several ways, treating Bloomsday like Groundhog Day. The animated score is made of text transformed algorithmically into music notation, both displayed using particle systems