Composition, Performance, Improvisation
- Title: The Vanishing Mirror
- Type: Composition, Performance, improvisation, air sampling
- Concept and Design: Greg Beller
- With: Dulguun Chinchuluun – Piano, Michael Heupel – Cello, Hanna Weiß – Voice and Greg Beller – Spatial Sampler XR
- Recording: Taizhi Shao / Das Studio (photo and video credits)
- Duration: 8min
- World Premiere: seidenstraße vol. 7, ResonanzRaum, Hamburg, 3-4 Dezember 2022
- Production: Kooltur Connect
“Your image in the mirror
This is my most beautiful poem
But hurry, it’s fading away
This is my last I love you “
These few ancient verses have crossed the 5 continents. The English translation of the Mongolian version does not show the homonymy between the mirror and the ice. This ice that inexorably melts, that takes with it the fragile beauty of our world, and brings us back to our human condition. Will we really know how to love before we disappear? In a mise en abîme, the vanishing mirror is represented here by a new musical instrument in VR: The SoundSpaceVR, allows to freeze the sound to modulate it in a creative gesture. This manipulation of the memory provokes at the same time the blindness of the two protagonists of a dead-end love story…
The vanishing mirror is the third performance in which I play Spatial Sampler XR, continuing the Air Sampling series. Air sampling is a series of improvised performances in which a sound source is sampled and distributed in space in real time. In this third performance, the sound source is given by Hanna Weiß to voice. Greg Beller, playing with the instruments Sound Space, Spatial Trigger and Spatial Looper, records and spreads the samples in space with a VR Headset. Then he plays them in an improvised musical choreography, making with Hanna Weiß a double set, while playing along on his composition for piano, cello, voice and electronics.
