Bang on a Can

This performance of "Escalator" for the Bang in a Can All-Stars is one of the few occasions where my music has been played by an ensemble other than my own. The piece had its beginnings in a duet performance piece with percussionist Pierre Berthet in Belgium in 1988, and it has been performed in various transformation by The Orchestra of Excited Strings over the years. In 1986-87 I began working on a "digital dynamic processing system" for a commission at "Ars Electronica" in Linz in 1987 and further developed this in a residency at STEIM in Amsterdam in 1989. This system was triggered with recorded machine tracks and interacts with acoustic instruments. Its basis are recordings of the rhythms produced by a number of malfunctioning escalators on the Blvd. Ansbach in Brussels which I made in 1987. In this version of "Escalator", composed in 1995, I notated repetitive rhythmic patterns found in these recordings and scored them for cimbalom, prepared electric guitar and cello, later adding layers of percussion, saxophone and prepared "excited strings" bass in collaboration with the musicians. -Arnold Dreyblatt