Commodity music (darmstadt 2016)

Commodity Music is a performance/concert, featuring four instrumentalists, video and pre recorded sounds.
The premiere of this show was presented in Darmstadt, on july 31st 2016.
The performers were the Zwerm guitar quartet.
The show was conceived to happen in a venue which allows the audience to move around, in various rooms.
The performers as well can move and therefore create a multistage-multifocus-multimedia show.

According to Plato, there are four categories of workers:
the farmer, the weaver, the shoe maker and the mason. If these four categories work SEPARATELY, the society is safe, and stable. However, there is a fifth category, added later in the dialog (Laws): the artist. The artist is the bastard, because (s)he mixes the categories: between real and fake, between true and false, human and dive, natural and artificial, good and bad, he imitates our passions, (s)he is DANGEROUS.

For Marx, the separation is central in the description of the class struggle, although he doesn t divide the society in four plus one categories, but more into a binary opposition.
Nowadays the separations of workers categories don´t fit the description of Plato, and the artist doesn t have a place in the Capital.
The workers and the leading class are changed, moved into a cloud of international products, in the realm of energy (gas, oil), network (the internet, communications), military and security industries.
The artist in this new world order has to adapt. If not to become a plain member of the society, a normal worker, at least he has learnt how to make money, how to become worth. The music has become sellable, not only magical. A commodity, not only message from the unknown (interceding with the Gods).

According to Morton Friedmann, there is no better way to improve freedom and wealth than the free market.

 Musicians imitating a peep show : are peeping and performing music compatible ?


What´s left to musicians, artists, between keeping the orphic approach ("i´m the rival of God, the interface beween Humans and the Big Mystery"), and making business ("i live with my time, and i´m pragmatic, dammit")?

attempt to imitate the gestures of the worker.

 a whole series of attempts

(these videos were shown throughout the show Commodity Music)

attempt to imitate the gestures of the sportman.

The musicians react in real time with the video projected against the walls.

The show Commodity music ended with the performance of Wandering Rocks, which uses the same basic musical material. Wandering Rocks was performed outside, it doesn´t contain any text, nor video.

This is a performance of that piece in a concert hall, in Orléans.