23 May The Connection

The Connection features a text which is rhythmically recited by the performer, consisting of a two-page letter in twenty segments, entitled “The Connection,” by the Russian surrealist writer Daniil Kharms (1905-1942). This text also generates the music, with its metric patterns being translated to rhythms, and vowel sounds to pitches. In keeping with the shaggy-dog trajectory of the letter, however, these translations are arbitrary and non- linear, and so the music, rather than acting as an accompaniment or a mirror image, becomes an independent entity, a kind of obligato to the text, unfolding with its own loopy logic.