Orrerysinger Sound Art

Orrerysinging is an improvisation for musicians and the Orrery Singer – a sound-art object collaboratively created by Thomas Meixner, Martin Riches and Annesley Black. The Orrereysinger is part percussion instrument, part cogwheel-conductor, and is controlled manually by a crank. In Orrerysinging, the relationship between the members of the ensemble and the orrery-singer is in a constant state of fluctuation – a multifaceted contrapunctal web is spun between them. Is the orrery-conductor conducting the instruments or is it an autonomous visual voice? The pulses may seem to be aligned, but they may be slowly shifted, until a previous subdivision becomes a new down-beat. The orrery-percussion instrument is not merely an analogue, multi-tempo drummachine, to which the instruments respond, like a metronome or click track. The human interventions (oscillating speed-changes of the turning of the crank, interferences in the regular pulses of the mallets, playing the instrument manually like a piano) create a lively tension between the mechanical and potential musical, artistic or human qualities.