Teresa Cos - Karnofsky's Score (2023)

‘Karnofsky’s Score’ is the imagined soundtrack of a film yet to exist and of lives dealing with existence itself. Inspired by the Karnofsky Performance Scale, a scoring system widely used in medical oncology where 100 equals ‘normal’ and 0 equals ‘dead’, artist Teresa Cos undertakes a journey where numbers are shuffled and time is stretched. Part of a body of work that includes visual scores and a forthcoming film sharing the album’s narration, ‘Karnofsky’s Score’ may indeed be guided by the ghost of David A. Karnofsky himself, the pioneer oncologist of the 1950s and 60s who had earlier conducted experiments with the US Army Chemical Warfare Service. He died of cancer aged 55, becoming subject to the system he created.

Recorded and mixed while on artist residencies across Europe, the album is built from a composition of guitar improvisations running through a four-track looping recorder, delay, and pitch-shifting pedals, with additional harmonica on the last twin tracks. The left/right monitoring that persists throughout the composition echoes a wavering between the extreme poles of the 0/100 scale, but is contradicted by a whole palette of emotions, at times scattered, at times doomed, at times joyfully playful. Minimal and lyrical, the atmosphere is haunting, occasionally eerie.

Nothing lasts too long. The play of ‘Karnofsky’s Score’ is in the interval between two octaves in music, the extremes of a scale which in the abstraction of western notation run upwards and downwards to infinity, in reality until the limits of embodied perception are met.