The piece is titled «Laughter Gas» and is written for a large ensemble. Lately, I’ve been focusing heavily on voice work, which stemmed from my collaboration with N’Caged, and I’ve discovered so much about myself—for instance, aspects related to sound extraction and so forth. My work with voice overshadowed my instrumental work for a time; honestly, I struggled with how to get back to the ensemble. I can understand how to write for a solo instrument and grasp what I’m dealing with—the performer’s individuality. But an ensemble, especially if there’s a conductor, is an incredibly opaque structure. This piece became my return to instrumental ensemble through a very strange doorway: through the sensation of instruments as strange voices. For example, the human body as a oboe. The human as an oboe, and it sings. These ideas motivated me.
The second point relates to my improvisational practices. I became interested in dispersing something among the musicians that would exist outside the text—something contained within improvisation. Improvisation itself is a laughter gas: for some strange reason, people begin to communicate with each other in a strange language, and seemingly, they have a connection, yet it is very difficult to grasp. In this score, I dispersed it this way
