Instrumentation

• Vibraphone
• Prerecorded Electronics

Duration

c. 3 minutes

About the work

Electro Fractal Gamelan was written in 2011 for the Kammerklang development project Worship the Machine, which paired music with trapeze.  Worship the Machine visited the idea of androids playing nostalgic music in some kind of wasteland, so Electro Fractal Gamelan was written with this in mind.
The electronic backing track to this work is based entirely on sine wave blips revolving around the harmonic series on A.  There are 8 lines, each cycling randomly through different octaves at double the rate of the previous, creating the effect of a very simple binary fractal. The binary rhythms and continuity of the notes resembles the effect of kotekan in Balinese Gamelan, where two parts play interlocking patterns to produce a rapid constant line.
After a while, one begins to hear phantom rhythms in the electronic track.  I devised the track first and wrote the vibraphone part to complement this by selecting a few phantom rhythms and allowing the vibraphone player some choice in the pitches used to explore these rhythmic cells.  Reverb and overdrive effects gradually build over the duration of the track, and eventually, to complement this, the Vibraphone player moves to tremolo playing, again given a choice of pitches in their part.

P.P. 2014

Availability

Score

Score for loan, score and parts for sale from Australian Music Centre.

Click here to download the backing track needed to perform this work.

Recording

Live recording by percussionist Kaylie Dunstan now available to stream/purchase from Bandcamp on the Kammerklang album BETA.