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SIFSUA is the acronym for ‘System (for) Interpolated Fixed Sound (and) Uniform Apparatus’, a work that has been performed a number of times under different circumstances since 2006, with each subsequent performance revised and further refined, although it’s conceptual framework has remained unchanged.
The ‘interpolatory’ system employed by SIFSUA, requires each of the performers to activate a bank of material that has been prepared by another performer, without prior knowledge of it’s content. This forces each performer to discover and explore the properties of the material during the performance. Each performer is thus responsible for a dual role; activating the material allocated to them at their discretion, whist the material they have prepared is allocated and activated at the discretion of another. As each performer will be unfamiliar with the material they have been provided, they must either speculate or test the material aurally, and in so doing will inevitably abbreviate, fragment or otherwise disrupt the continuity of the material before an eventual musical execution of it.
Furthermore, the materials may only be activated via a single, identical playback device each (in this case, portable CD players), ensuring that each performer has equal operational capability and no further functions by which to distinguish their activity from the rest. This also serves to cohere the inevitable differences in the material, by being subjected to the same parameters (i.e. play, forward, rewind, stepped volume control etc.) in which to control the behaviour of the outcome, and becomes a unifying principle. Each movement is timed to 4 minutes, but may sometimes take longer for each performer to finish, and complete a changeover.
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Performed by Adam Asnan, Giuseppe Ielasi, Attila Faravelli and Sebastiano Carghini. Recorded live at AUNA festival 2014, at Zona K, Milan, 14/11/14. Additional recording by Attila Faravelli. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi Special thanks to the performers and Nicola Ratti.
