"Farther Than the Front"
The Recording
This is a generous commission from Alcatel
The mandate for the commission is that I play a number of roles: Composer; Sound Designer: Editor; Violinist (which I am not schooled in): Gong Performance and Voice which must be attenuated after the performance to reflect a change of gender from male (me) to female... and conductor of the ensemble.
"In Mr. Smith's work you will hear abrupt sonic change; pops, clicks, about faces; shifts...all mapped and planned, but no concern to the observer.
...the heavy, awkward pull of a faraway world full of vanished people, whose lives had rubbed up against time; regret over sounds we didn’t see coming; a melancholic determination to walk through all the rooms. I knew I would try to assimilate the things I’d never heard into some kind of “revised appreciation”; that I would listen at the familiar in search of distracting details, anything that would banish the weight of time and memory."
Ndiol Maka Seck - Le Soleil - Dakar, Senegal
ITALY’S AUTONOMIA MOVEMENT was less a group of people or an organization to which one belonged than a milieu or network of spaces through which elements of the Italian “extreme” Left moved.
Though in many areas of the country autonomia had its base in the student and women’s movements, what distinguished it was its deep roots in certain segments of the working class, in particular those who had emigrated from the south of the country, outside the Communist Party and trade union culture that was so dominant in the northern industrial cities.
Not a party, autonomia was a form of struggle (a set of practices, a theoretical orientation). Because it never assumed a recognizable political contour, just who or what autonomia was has remained difficult to nail down.
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