Astatine
I try to avoid consistently drawing upon the same sources as reference materials; there have been long periods when I was influenced by the textures
of abstract expressionist art, or Fassbinder, or Mayakovsky, or less obvious things, such as the grammatical syntaxes of foreign languages. I am
still fascinated by these things and people, but am finding myself to be increasingly influenced by less conventional notions, like complex
mechanical machines, studies of the behaviour of light, or, in the case of this piece, the properties of exotic chemical elements.
Astatine is the rarest naturally-occurring element on earth; it comes into existence through the decay of heavier elements, and itself decays
away within anything from a fraction of a second to a few hours; it is estimated that at any given moment, less than a gram of it exists in the
earth's crust. It is therefore part of a process of the destruction of matter, of the sudden entropic scattering of quantum energy which had laid
inert for aeons. "...only the allegory of the Empire remains." The nature of this barely-more-than-hypothetical substance was, for me, metaphorically
rich when considered alongside the genesis/evolution/decay of sonic material, both through the application of various transformative processes within the
piece itself and due to the refractive distortion to which musical material is subjected when it enters our memory.
Unstable dream, according to the place,
Be steadfast once, or else at least be true.
By tasted sweetness make me not to rue
The sudden loss of thy false feignèd grace.
By good respect in such a dangerous case
Thou broughtest not her into this tossing mew
But madest my sprite live, my care to renew,
My body in tempest her succour to embrace.
The body dead, the sprite had his desire,
Painless was th'one, th'other in delight.
Why then, alas, did it not keep it right,
Returning, to leap into the fire?
And where it was at wish, it could not remain,
Such mocks of dreams they turn to deadly pain.
-Sir Thomas Wyatt