Ari Benjamin Meyers online exhibition: “Serious Immobilities (Module 4 / Instrumental Version)”

The artist and composer Ari Benjamin Meyers presents a recorded excerpt from his work “Serious Immobilities (Module 4/Instrumental Version)”. The title is a quote from the introduction of the famous piece Vexations by Erik Satie: “In order to play the theme 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, and in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.” Meyers originally composed the ten music-performance modules of Serious Immobilities to be performed continuously over a span of 6 hours a day by 2 musicians and 4 singer/dancers for his first show at the gallery Esther Schipper (Berlin, 2013). What we hear in Meyers’ piece for OTO Sound Museum is Module No. 4, as played in 2014 in the famed Berlin space Kantine am Berghain by two musicians with whom the artist has often worked over the years. Conceived almost as a sculpture, the musicians play directly across from each other for 45 minutes, facing one another, repeating and shifting a cyclical and energetic musical phrase, in a dark and ritual atmosphere, witnessed by an absorbed audience that tightly surrounds them in the middle of the space. The musicians become tableaux vivants locked in a paradoxical immobility of pure repetitive intensity. They immerse themselves in their amplified sound, they merge into it, and we do it with them now years later, also questioning our ability to listen and visualize: the performance and its recording become today an evocative rite.

Link to listen “Serious Immobilities”