Something
Written on June 17th, 2023 by Brandon Woo Snyder‘something’ is a 1-month-long social media performance, where a quartet of remote musicians post and respond to each other’s instagram reels, as well as record reactions and commentary from friends and strangers.
Each musician was tasked to create a remix/duet to a previous musician’s reel, creating a new reel that is in some ways a reaction, other ways an accompaniment, and in other ways an appropriation. Each reel is a statement that is (mis)interpreted, recontextualized, and (dis)integrated into new musical forms in each subsequent version of itself. The music is both mundane and escapist, often using everyday sounds and creative mic placement to create otherworldly soundscapes.
This video is from the premiere of ‘something’, at the Browser Sound festival. It is a selection of reels from the project, as well as the live creation of a few reels on stage.
0:00 - PART I, Overture 2:49 - PART IIa, Idea and Execution 7:13 - PART IIb, Remix/Duet/Stitch 8:54 - PART III, React 14:32 - (my phone storage was full and needed to delete photos on stage) 16:11 - PART IV, public-but-private-but-public audiences 16:19 - (the chord connecting my phone to the stream unplugged and the video cuts out for 10 seconds)
As an artist, social media holds a tension of being both a tool for marketing and a means for long distance relationships. On these public social media accounts, friends, colleagues and strangers watched anonymously as we posted these reels. In this performance, we were not so much interested in ‘trending’ or ‘going viral’ on Instagram, so much as we wanted to 1) create a form of musical improvisation that relies on a different, longer, and non-linear timescale, and 2) acknowledge the public-but-private-but-public nature of most social media audiences
