For voice, tape, barcode scanner, live electronics, feedback, bass instrument, and hand percussion.
Graphic score and written libretto; 20 mins duration.
Program Notes
The everyday affects of groceries and supermarkets feature prominently in Three Supermarket Events (2023). This project focuses on the supermarket as a site of mundane ritual, where we encounter our own indefatigable need to consume and to waste in order to function. The piece is written for a quartet of improvisers; with myself performing vocals and live electronics (including a hacked barcode scanner). The graphic score guides the instrumentalists on electronic feedback, bass instrument, and hand percussion. The scripted vocal part is adapted from three source texts, each featuring memorable passages which describe the experience of supermarket shopping: Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives (1983), Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985), and Timothy Morton’s And You May Find Yourself Living in an Age of Mass Extinction (2018).
My hybrid live and prerecorded spoken-word performance is underlaid by the three improvising instrumentalists, as well as a concrète tape track comprising field recordings from supermarkets. This profusion of texts, voices, and timbred mirrors the complexity of the supermarket as a social microcosm, as well as its overwhelming quantity of sensory information. Three Supermarket Events proceeds via absurdity, detail, vivid imagery and confusion — each being entirely plausible aspects of even the most routine grocery run.
Originally workshopped in 2023, I have two main planned updates for Three Supermarket Events before its performance at my dissertation Urban Event (February 2026). The aforementioned concrète tape track was not included in the original piece; I have not yet decided if the track will be fixed or algorithmic/generative, since this will be influenced by my ongoing field research.
Another major update addresses the theatricality of the performance. When intoning vocal passages from each of the three different text sources in Three Supermarket Events, I adopt three very different vocal personae. Some passages are spoken live, and others are pre-recorded. Previously, I used a MIDI keyboard to control a simple Max MSP patch and trigger the various vocal samples. While functionally effective, I plan to replace this prefabricated controller with a custom-built method of interfacing between my live and pre-recorded vocal personae. I am always interested in finding ways to draw on my sculptural background and create technological solutions which contribute to the specific aesthetics of my unique intermedia performances. I have acquired and begun hacking my latest instrument of choice: a barcode scanner. I plan to sculpt a series of oversized ersatz (likely papier-mâché) supermarket items; when the custom barcode attached to each is scanned, the vocal samples will trigger accordingly! Instead of sitting deadpan at a laptop and MIDI keyboard, I will sit deadpan at a supermarket checkout. During performance, I will lean into the absurd disjunction between my varied vocal personae and the blandness of repeatedly performing a bored cashier’s everyday gestures.