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Watch: Levy Lorenzo performs ‘Aphasia’ by Mark Applebaum

17 Jun 2022

The accomplished Filipino-American artist presents an exclusive performance of this piece, recorded for the Rewire 2021 online edition.

Working at the intersection of music, art, and technology, Levy Lorenzo’s body of work spans custom electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, free improvisation, and classical percussion. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. In the specially recorded performance he presents ‘Aphasia’, a piece conceived originally for singer and two-channel tape, commissioned by the GRM, Paris and composed for virtuoso singer Nicholas Isherwood.

Watch "Levy Lorenzo performs 'Aphasia'" by "Rewire" on https://www.youtube.com/

The tape, an idiosyncratic explosion of warped and mangled sounds, is made up exclusively of vocal samples, all provided by Isherwood and subsequently transformed digitally. Against the backdrop of this audio narrative, Lorenzo performed an elaborate set of hand gestures, an assiduously choreographed sign language of sorts. Each gesture is fastidiously synchronised to the tape in tight rhythmic coordination. The eccentricity of the hand gestures is perhaps upstaged only by the observation that Lorenzo produces no sound in concert.