"We have chased the sacred symbols from the desert and replaced them with electronic eyes"

(TAKIS Telelumiere No. 4 1963–4)



A composition in homage to the late artist TAKIS. A brutal, dream-like hypnotic soup of sensory tests, voice, wearable sound-material sculptures and augmented electronics.



I wanted to explore social structures and their relationship with sound, environmental and biological energies and material. A complex web of control and power that is played out upon the human body.

After seeing TAKIS’s installations ‘Musicales’ and ‘Oscillations of The Sea’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Andros, Greece in 2017, I was inspired by the artists exploration of magnetic and gravitational energy. I was compelled to spend the next twelve months gathering recordings on another trip to Greece and across several European cities.



I manipulated field recordings of city and coastal construction sites, traditional Greek funeral laments, and my own experiments playing the insides of a piano with magnets.

I worked with Robin Foster to create a Max for Live granulator for vocals to capture and fragment my voice. This aims to emulate the metal rods that bounce as they encounter magnets in several of Takis’s sonic sculptures.

The piece is accompanied by sculptures that play as they melt, made from ice, contact microphones and cymbals.



The score for voice, body electronics, ice and percussion was developed using Anthony Howell’s three principles of ‘Stillness, Repetition, and Inconsistency’ (1999) I isolated a series of movements and text and used them as the basis of a fragment score. The movements and text examine and abstract the emotional impulses generated in dreams, versus everyday actions of care and self-destruction. Instrumentally, TAKIS is played with a selection of samples, pedals, percussion, and melting ice. The piece is cyclical. It can be begun anywhere and can end at any point.