excerpted from the print magazine…
It is early February and a light snow covers the Eastern European countryside.
We pass through low mountains and forests, past the tiled roofs of old villages.
Castles sit majestically atop high rocky perches. New developments tear through
the mountains, gray apartment buildings teetering on the brink of the factories
they exist to serve. The hard edges of Communist functionality seem strangely
at odds with the medieval towns that circle outward from their highest points
of church and state.
Departing from Vienna, I am moving through the Czech landscape toward Prague.
Anna Friz sits across from me as the train passes through cities, towns and
countryside. We head toward our last stops on a month-long European tour to
present our collaboration, a new media musical performance called The Automated
Prayer Machine.
Fate has me traveling toward Slovakia, the landscape of my father?s
heritage, as he, across the ocean, prepares to embark upon a six-hour open-heart
surgery, scheduled in a few days? time. I got word of his imminent procedure
in Vienna at the Kunstradio studio, immediately after our live broadcast on
Austrian national radio. The news hit like a ton of bricks. Thankfully, I have
a focus for the unfurling emotions. The music of the Prayer Machine is constantly
purring through my body ? the building layers of violin harmonies, swooping
satellite sounds, the enveloping drone of accordion. Snippets of its wise words
spill into my mind, and I know that I will be performing with a heightened passion.
Anna and I created The Automated Prayer Machine as an antidote to the bombardment
of disturbing news ? to broadcast hope, inspiration, potential. With our
mutual love of electronic soundscape and traditional musical instruments, we
set forth to perform a prayer wheel. We asked our friends and communities to
send prayers by email or to record messages on our answering machines. Their
replies became the fabric in a concert of live radio transmissions that, when
performed, takes us on a challenging voyage toward a destination of rippling
sound and lighted words.
When we first put out the call for prayers, we had no idea how it would be
received. I pressed ?send? to an email list of hundreds, with a
Ganesh mantra on the brain, but part of me was cynical, if curious and hopeful.
Who prays these days? And how do they do it? The answering machine messages
started pouring in almost immediately. As we digitized them, I could feel my
heart centre moving. One of those rare glimpses of opening that almost tickles
with a tear-jerking bliss.
* * *
The nervous jitters, the dim lights, the
hush of the room. The Automated Prayer Machine performance begins with blips
of short-wave radio noise bouncing through the space on portable radios that
have been placed throughout the audience. Anna and I sit behind a table full
of wires, samplers, effects pedals and mixers. The noise builds. This is our
Radio Tower of Babel, the darkest moment in the piece, when we stir up the silt
of the last few years of terror-heavy media reports and face the scourge of
right-wing talk radio. We are taking a furious ride through a sonic climate
of sensationalism, airing the stuff that makes us fearful and apathetic. Anna
captures live radio and feeds it into a pulsating mass. I throw in snapshot
samples of wild street drumming.
?I?m talkin? about war,?
says the twangy fundamentalist preacher.
For this we pick up our instruments and
pound out a tchardas, Anna on her accordion, and I with my violin, starting
in time to a rhythm of words, a slow minor oompah, old country in the blood.
Gradually we speed into a dancing frenzy. No longer numbed by the media, we
stop ... and drop into a heartbeat of looping accordion.
