For live and prerecorded voice
Gustavo Matamoros and Bob Gregory
Duration: 7′57″
World premiere: June 27, 1991
Center for the Fine Arts, Miami
Crypsis is a work for live and prerecorded voice created with writer and performer Bob Gregory. Gregory performs live over a tape assembled from fragments of his own recorded speech, while I mix the two manifestations of his voice for the audience.
The live voice and its prerecorded double alternately reveal, alter and conceal one another.
BENDING THE WORD
The work responds to a note by Jasper Johns:
“I thought that one thing to do with the written word was to pretend that it was an object which could be bent.”
In Crypsis, words are bent through fragmentation, repetition and changes of context. Gregory’s voice serves two functions at once: it presents a narrative live while also becoming a changing sound element within that narrative.
In zoology, crypsis is the term for concealment. The title refers to the way recognizable speech remains present while its familiar identity is partly hidden by its transformation into sound.
VOICE WITHIN VOICE
The tape was created using essentially the same sampling and scanning process later associated with Portrait: Bob Gregory. Minute fragments of Gregory’s recorded voice were isolated and reorganized into changing sequences.
Listening to the recording now, I believe the source utterance was “so anyway so.”
During a performance, Gregory’s live voice is heard over the fixed tape. I control the relationship between them through the mix sent to the audience.
PREMIERE AND RECORDING
Crypsis received its world premiere on June 27, 1991, during PUNTO’s Music Out of a Cage at the Center for the Fine Arts in downtown Miami. The concert was presented by the Center for the Fine Arts in collaboration with the South Florida Composers Alliance.
This is the only performance presently documented.
A live performance recording was later published on Subtropics Vol. 1: Breath in 2002. The surviving information available to me does not yet establish whether that recording was made at the premiere.
LISTEN
Crypsis
Gustavo Matamoros and Bob Gregory
Live performance recording
Duration: 7′57″
ARCHIVAL DOCUMENT
Download the 1991 PUNTO: Music Out of a Cage program
RELATED
Read more about: Portrait: Bob Gregory
Read more about Subtropics Vol. 1: Breath