DISCO BLOODBATH (GOT TO BE REAL)
PIECE FOR 8 INSTRUMENTS AND AUDIO PLAYBACK
Disco Bloodbath (Got to be real) is a piece commissioned by the Warsaw Autumn Festival, and has been premiered by Black Page Orchestra on 26th September 2018. It is a 16 minutes long collage of different melodies, harmonies, rhythms, beats and even songs. Its subtitle comes from the song by Cheryl Lynn.
This work is inspired by two very different phenomenons: the ballroom culture and the gaming society. Those 2 completely different societies have a very important thing in common - identity freedom, especially when it comes to gender. In the ballroom/drag scene gender is something very fluid, flexible. In the gaming world, gender is something that is not important as far as you're a good player. Those two worlds also got in common another thing - being funny through being unpolite, arguing with each other for fun. People in both communities like to insult each other, which seems to be a specific kind of a game between people. So - the ballroom scene and the gaming society seem to be realities, that are a beautiful contrast to the real world - by becoming virtual, you finally start to become real. And You got to be real, darling!
[…] Disco Bloodbath is a playback, explicitly confronted with live instruments – what a reverse to the deception of Milla Vanilla from the piece by Schüttler! – it was a tool for identity testing, but also for unmasking various simple figures: the range of the saxophone at the beginning or the band's arpeggios in one of the culminations. Moreover, the acoustic parts are full of various conventions here, which, however, are enveloped by the aura of glitch electronics, giving the entire piece a drive and causing at least a few false culminations. An important role is played by drums, with numerous virtuoso vibraphone, marimba and drums, whose rhythms become a link between two worlds.
snippet from review by Jan Topolski
