The iPoet asks “How the poet can be heard in a world of screens?” which is actually both question and statement. The answer is the medium in which the poem is contained. The work delivers it’s finest moment when it cut’s through to transcendence with the insight “the poet writes life hearing death.” ‘Why do we need poets?’ indeed.
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Felipe Barral Momberg, the self-proclaimed iPoet, is a one man revolution. His piece “The arrival of the iPoet” is the manifesto of iPoetry. The work explicitly blurs the boundries between poetry, music and visual art. There is a strong connection between Momberg’s iPoetry and the Artronica movement. We both embrace the spirit of removing the aesthetic constructs that sometimes seem to unnecessarily segregate the arts. We say ‘Music is Art’. Momberg’s refreshingly direct work says iPoetry is art AND music…and we agree!
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I’m pleased to finally show my composition “The World (100 Loops)“, the first in a series called “Non-linear Music“. The series is a revival of works I composed in 2003. I was influenced by the short phrase aleatoric method of Terry Riley’s “In C”, the direct melodicism of Philip Glass and the phase shifting of Steve Reich.
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For “The World” I composed an entire composition of a minute and a half with MIDI and then arranged it for an orchestra (with my very limited understanding of orchestral arrangement). The next step was more fun. In Cubase (a program I no longer use thanks to improvements in Ableton Live) I approximated the orchestra sounds with VST synths. Then I broke down each instrument line into 9 phrase loops (except for the string baseline (top) which stands alone as the main theme). Originally I pulled in the looped phrases into Ableton and the piece was intended to be performed by myself randomly firing off the clips in Ableton as a performance. I actually recorded some of the ‘performances’ (no one was watching but what to call them?) and that’s where I left the series in 2003.
An important realization of today is that we had been making Artronica all along, for over a decade. We just didn’t realize what it was. We will have to mine the lost art artifacts of our pasts, dust them off and present them in their true context.