Mark Fell (Mayumi Hosokura)

Mark Fell — Every non-empty ultra-connected compact space has a largest proper open subset

UK premiere

Following from its world premiere in Tuscany at Centro Pecci, Explore Ensemble presents the UK premiere of a new long-form work by Mark Fell, one the UK’s leading electronic musicians and sound artists. Initiated during lockdown, the project applies Fell’s algorithmic practice to Explore Ensemble’s core sextet, where each player is cast as an independent layer in a vast constellation of shifting patterns, or in Fell’s words, ‘behaviours’, with an ordering that is permuted prior to every performance.

Working with the ensemble musicians individually over the past two years, Fell has explored a series of techniques, processes and sounds, dissecting in microscopic detail the sound-making potential of each instrument-performer unit.

The new work extends Fell’s focus on ‘paralleling’, a term that foregrounds an aversion to any systems that draw players together into familiar forms of collective behaviour – including both score-based and improvisatory practices. To this end, the work prohibits group rehearsals, and asks players to apply simple rules to alter the structure of their elements, in isolation from fellow performers. Thus, the aesthetic character of behavioural interactions becomes purely coincidental.