Tripping in The Horror Vacui (2022)

for violin, cello, piano, and electronics

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This piece is an exploration in heaviness, density, and maximalism. Here, heaviness relates to my interest in contemporary metal music, noise music, and experimental avant-garde concert music. In the work, heaviness is manifested musically through massive noise masses, crushing drones, and the creation of “electroacoustic super-instruments” that play noisy collages of complex riffs and clustery monophonic melodies.

Ideas of heaviness and density connects to the concept of horror vacui, also referred to as kenophobia (from Greek for “fear of the empty”). Horror vacui is a visual aesthetic that is characterized by the filling of the entire surface of a space with detail. Besides the various pieces of visual art that inspired the music and its concepts, I was particularly inspired by the following quote from Aristotle discussing the concept of the horror vacui as it pertains to physics.

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“In a void, no one could say why a thing once set in motion should stop anywhere; for why should it stop here rather than here? So that a thing will either be at rest or must be moved ad infinitum unless something more powerful gets in its way”. — Aristotle, Physics, Book IV, section 8

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The idea of tripping relates to psychedelic experiences and ego death. Ego death, which results in complete transcendence of the self is a reference to the transcendence one experiences when encountering massive musical objects that are intensely overwhelming and sublime.