Artifacts (I) is drawn from a (projected) series of works based entirely on sounds from a near-broken violin. The violin, despite being full-size was given to me by my grandmother when I was too young to remember, a hint to my parents that I should get violin lessons. I ended up getting cello lessons instead and the violin collected dust, and endured several seasons of humidity and lack thereof, leading to the collapsed of its soundpost.

This piece explores memory and the (mis)representation of events in time through documentation and recording.

This violin seemed like an apt sound-source for such a piece. I used the strings — bowed, plucked, struck, scraped, bent from the other side of the bridge, but also the body of the instrument — the sound of the paint and varnish being scraped off by the microphone, the body being struck, the soundpost being shaken around inside of it.

The processing of the materials was inspired by various recording media — everything from sound of old 78 RPM to corrupt MP3 files. Compositionally I also was interested by suggesting certain stylistic markers. There was also an awareness on my part of evocations and manipulations of time on the level of a recording in and of itself, the perception of historical time, and time in the personal / nostalgic domain, and how these temporal lines intersect.

Source: JTTP 2008