SEPTET FOR THE END OF MESSIAEN ENSEMBLE SOON
Thursday 23 March – Ian Hanger Recital Hall
Ensemble Sooon
https://www.ensemblesooon.com/
Ensemble Sooon is an indy-classical ensemble performing works blending notation and open-form structures, ranging through swirling musical currents. Formed in 2022, they performed their debut concert at Mitchell Fine Art, followed by a series of concerts for Made Now Music, Oscillo Scape and Queensland State Library’s Don Ross exhibition. In early 2023, Ensemble Sooon recorded their album ‘Tacetify’ due for release in July. Their single launch ‘Transmogrify’ will be released on April 2nd at the Junk Bar. Tonight, Ensemble Sooon presents Martin Kay's 'Septet for the End of Time', an epic repurpose of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, eking out grooves, glitches and palimpsests. Chunks are taken, displaced, reworked, deconstructed and hurled through space. Featuring new poetry by Brentley Fraser, the septet traverses emotional and intervallic plots. The work is in five movements, preceded by a poetry reading from Brentley, accompanied by the ensemble.
Ensemble Sooon
Martin Kay (saxophone/bass clarinet)
Danielle Bentley (Cello)
Nozomi Omote (percussion)
Featuring special guests:
Brentley Frazer (poetry)
Kalyleigh Pincott (vocals)
Carl Harvoe (trumpet)
Chris Stover (trombone)
Annie Silva (Double Bass)
Quartet for the End of Time
by Brentley FrazerJesus said: Whoever searches must continue to search until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed; and being disturbed, they will marvel and reign over All.
One cool morning on dawn born with storms as my daughter performed her usual mutinies beyond the moral city of right & wrong on the periphery yet of wake & sleep I witnessed a killing, a murder of crows mutilate a pheasant in the shadows between the houses out our kitchen window. With screams of Beauty torn & blood & golden feathers I watched Metaphor give birth to Knowledge, Pretty die in Ugly’s birth-canal, the final act of innocence bowing like the rowdy toddler everyone laughs at & Instagrams in this kindergarten Christmas pantomime of life.
My daughter’s eyes widened to the world of dingoes & joeys, snakes & rabbits, goats & lambs, rape & pillage, right there on my hip as I made her porridge & she cried, but I couldn't stop the carnage or the cats that came for her exquisite corpse on the footpaths of our suburban bardo.
It got me thinking—of sad mansions & happy slums, the depths beyond the shallows where toddlers & old widows wade hunching for new shells at sunset, of prisoners with pens & free men with guns, of the emu places beneath freeways, acres of burning cane fields, defaced cave paintings & storm drain faded graffiti, genetics & evolution, the DNA of angels & the children of men; how the romance is gone from love, the matriphagous universal server farm drumming the web summoning her young to feast on puppy memes, Facebook, gore-porn & HD bestiality. God! are you there, man? I shouted. I say God, but this is rhetorical; the propaganda of royal lineage billionaires & techno feudalists in all those Babylons on perfume bottles. I see a preacher preying with a capital e in chapel perilous. A now Calvin posting new rules for carnal avatars:
Never disturb internet predators who fetishise pain & moralise pleasure, who dance with ladies in red ever closer to the edge at private bars & crooning: I’ve never seen that dress you’re wearing, in party rooms of parliament, bondage clubs & thrill abysses, torment & insanity, ecstasy, cocaine & Jägerbombs, stupid
eyes intoxicated blind—auto-tune & subwoofers at volume maximum. All I’ve ever known is a photostream of beautiful failures & spectacular despairs; my 8k ultra HD retina display digital life 404 not found, when the cloud fails all my old idolatries deleted gone forever never resurrected like that pheasant pious earthbound being dead & eaten by maggots & rats. How can I protect my daughter? I can pick myself up from among the fallen, shake off the windscreen glass & pick over the victims for bling, like a butcher-bird, an eagle, a vulture
fighting over the soul meat of an angel carcass on the freeway. Sacred ibis &/or profane bin-chicken, its feathers & leather spread a kilometre like someone microwaved a bondage swan. A terrorist who maims the only religion left the foremost concern of every dancer in the club the vanities; my own beauty gone like grandma time-worn or washed away in an acid attack in London or who knows, your town next, & we’ll sit there, fake champagne & cardboard hors d’oeuvres unable to act, supermodels attending a catalogue wedding with no guests & a dozen photographers, our hearts like blown-out birthday candles & no-one gets the joke, but everyone laughs for a living as they twerk off the contours of death. Let’s get in the car my little darling, & drive . . . I’ll strap you in we’ll vault from the battery citizens & visit some free-range farmers,
somewhere elevated, south down the M1 to Tambourine mountain, away from the rage of motors & whispers of hawkers to the wailing wows & holy-shit of curlews & the tymbaling of cicadas. My daughter, don’t be afraid of the rumbling it’s not the apocalypse it’s buses & b-doubles carting cyborgs & rubble to hirisers & crushers, Shine Lawyers or Warner Brothers; the car-park at Dream World is abandoned. My little one, you’re on the nod like social ethics & my selfesteem. Let me tell you a story as you jingaling to sleep, a tragedy in slow motion like a wrecked arachnid under a thong. We’ll be off the arterial soon, where the signs have bullet holes, & we’ll wind on down slow roads past fields of old machinery rusty repository ghosts of imperial impulse & colonial action born of greed & principality, madmen shouting:
Terra nullius! here’s my ensign my family coat of arms! like deranged multihorticulturalists tending inflicted gardens in savage yards of irons & gums, planting oaks & roses & flagpoles anchoring imperial ships on the ancient ocean floor, into the red earth’s flesh, & ancient skulls. It’s okay, Bubba, I don't expect you’ll understand human beings are paradox, cognitive dissonance in action & yes, I’m talking the self-referential semantics of Human. Earthly Being, Dirt & Spirit, the obvious & the unimaginable, looking at our reflections believing what
we see, claiming we are Sapiens, we are wise. We are not. We are giddy stultus star-children, silly & ignorant the detritus of everything we’ve believed & mistaken for truth semiotics logical & lexical lilies for love & also at funerals, we learned it from the slosh of amniotic fluid, the protective belly-hold the pregnant show before she knows it & gives up alcohol & coffee, the only reassuring rub that matters, a hug from Her. Even bad men love their mothers; unless they’re invalid, irredeemable tickets to cancelled concerts, or already punched & it’s too late the music’s over, damaged animals prowling pubs & lonely outback rest stops, psycho’s with dog cages driving Land Rovers or Toyotas & he’s coming our redeemer, but we’ve not unwrapped us, or our Season’s Greetings presents & it’s almost time for chocolate eggs.
O Lord of Self Worth, lead me through this wasteland of bogans knocking koalas from eucalypts with empty stubbies; lead me from tedium vitae, crippling ennui & perpetual grunge malaise. O Lord of Social Inclusion, give me scripted diagnoses & S.R.I. equilibrium, soothe these scars I can’t remember receiving. Blossom, I see you in the rear-view sleeping; let’s take this service exit & get a happy meal. I’m tired & greying & my heart is aching like four compacted wisdoms. I’m ugly when I smile & no one is worse than me at living. I tell you, my little one Life is a cookbook of old recipes for new disasters & I hope it flops on Goodreads, because we’re all sick, no one’s better & everyone’s dying while in the pit the orchestra plays a quartet for the end of time.
