Robert Crouch - Organs (2015)

"This is how it should be done. Lodge yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it offers find an advantageous place on it, find potential movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight, experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there, try out continua of intensities segment by segment, have a small plot of new land at all times."
– Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

The three works comprising 'Organs' were selected and edited from a year of recordings developed in collaboration with choreographer and artist Julie Tolentino in 2014. Three separate projects were documented through audio recordings of performances and rehearsals, as well as related field recordings. Each piece recalls a matrix of encounters between a specific body (or bodies) within a unique context, conducting and responding to sounds, both electronic and organic. The interplay of the soft tissue, sinew, bone and blood of the body-organ, pushing against/within/outside the sustained tones and synthetic expressions of the techno-organ. Each organ exists simultaneously alienated from, and an extension of, the other.

'Somniloquy' was constructed using a recording of Tolentino “playing” the broken organ in preparation for the performance 'Process(ion)X' at the Church of the Epiphany. 'The eyes of fire' is based on a recording from Drive Your Cart And Plow Over The Bones Of The Dead, a nine hour performance with Julie Tolentino, Stosh Fila, and Robert Crouch at the San Francisco Art Institute, curated by Tania Hammidi. 'The Propaganda of History' was developed from a series of recordings made during rehearsal sessions with Tolentino and Mark Steger, with additional field recordings of Fourth of July fireworks from Madison, Wisconsin.