Inside/out (1990)

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Inside/out was commissioned by Heidi Grundmann of Austrian Radio (ORF, Wien) as part of a multimedia collaborative event and radio broadcast with the global title Entree/sortie. Ten composers/sound artists from across the world were sent a series of recordings of doors and gates in Vienna being opened and closed, with accompanying photos and other documentation, and asked to use them as the starting point for a composition lasting a maximum of five minutes. In the broadcast the compositions were to be overlapped by unspecified amounts, so this gave me some formal criteria for the piece, which starts suddenly - as if it has already been going on and has suddenly been 'switched' into, and ends with a long, languid decay of sustained material. The instructions were interpreted metaphorically as indicating a concern with internal and external space, and opening/closure.