Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade for Trumpet and Cello: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

 

“Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade”: An Aesthetic Technology for Trumpet and Cello

One does not read this score. One enters it.

Across its partitioned surface—etched in chromatic vector and modular topology—we encounter not a composition, but a system of knowing. "Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" refuses the linearity of conventional music notation and instead orchestrates a machine for time-experiencing, rendered simultaneously in data, metaphor, and myth.

It is written for trumpet and cello—two instruments stretched here not only across register, but across epistemic tension: breath and bow, metallic propulsion and fibrous resistance. The result is less a duet and more a semantic exchange, conducted across contradictory zones of presence and absence.

The first frame of the score is both ornamental and clinical. Brass-gold gradients clash against gunmetal blue fields. These chromatic fields do not merely stage notation; they perform an affective inversion. What glows with visual clarity obfuscates in meaning; what appears simple throbs with recursive complexity.

“Luxtrapathy”—an invented compound of lux (light, radiance) and pathy (feeling, suffering)—designates a form of illumination that blinds even as it seduces. Here, musical gestures are not written as commands but exposures. Notation blooms into calligraphic morphology, part architectural plan, part surgical interface.

Beneath the brass title “TOMIAVA 5” and its shadow-opposite “YALSIVO 9,” a field of spectral glyphs flicker: notated as if haunted, spectralized into the faint, the barely-there. The music becomes a technology of fading, where events are scaffolded on the brink of disappearance. What remains is not the phrase, but its residue.

In another discreet panel, we find ourselves among brands, syllables, and patented fragments: CHERILLISP. TYMAT. LINGSONN. CITO.

They are not names. They are vectors—tokens of a para-economic language. The score here dissolves into corporate surrealism, where every name is both a claim and a veil. Graphically, these are arranged within radiant zones of silver and mauve: not neutral, but institutional. Bureaucratic gradients masquerading as elegance.

Each musical passage here is framed in quasi-algorithmic units. What looks like traditional staves is quietly dismantled by nested brackets, echo clusters, graphic interjections, and the occasional appearance of industrial iconography—a screw, a barcode, an architectural form.

What emerges is a kind of audit of musical labor. Each gesture must justify itself—not through expressive agency, but through diagrammatic consistency. It is the Capitalocene rendered in sound: a place where even breath and bowing technique are abstracted into value flows.

The third panel—perhaps the most elaborately designed—plunges us into the domain of the Logicade. Here the music becomes play, but a regulated play, with its own grammar of control, glitch, and surprise.

Let us define the Logicade as a ludic epistemology: a worldview in which logic becomes game, and the game becomes score. Across this zone, trumpet and cello are cast not as interpreters but as operators—executors of sonic maneuvers inside a semiotic arcade.

Diagrams spiral. Notation stretches and recoils. Glissandi appear beside punctured spheres and orbital scripts. The Logicade rewards fluency not in reading music, but in navigating diagrammatic uncertainty.

Here, the musicians improvise not from instinct but from spatial coordinates. They do not perform; they simulate.

Towards a Lexicon of the Score

To engage with this system fully, we must name its parts—to score is to invent grammar. From this work, we derive the following terms:

• Luxtrapathy – The pathology of excessive visibility; when sonic form becomes overlit and evacuated of intimacy.

• Auditonics – The practice of rendering musical decisions legible to bureaucratic logic.

• Glyphonomy – The study of semiotic particles that carry neither pitch nor rhythm, but instructional aura.

• Value Drift – When notational form escapes its origin to accrue alternate meanings through placement.

• Logicade – A designed logic-as-game, wherein instrumental behavior becomes rule-determined action.

• Modal Ciphers – Sonic signatures encoded not as pitch collections but as spatial event triggers

• 
  

  
  .

—

Coda: Notation as Infrastructural Fiction

"Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene, and the Logicade" is not a performance score. It is an infrastructural fiction. Its diagrams simulate the behavior of sound within regimes of control, visibility, and abstraction.

Trumpet and cello here are instruments of more than tone: they are epistemic agents—conduits through which the score’s operative logic becomes temporarily audible.

We are not being asked to listen.

We are being asked to navigate.