Echopraxia

Echopraxia names involuntary mimicry — the body repeating a gesture before the self has consented to it. The piece treats imitation not as a metaphor but as a physical condition: voice, instrument, water and machine continuously reflect and transform one another. The first sound is a single drop of pigment on water. The first movement is in the water, not in the ensemble.

Across five movements — We Speak Lies, and We Silence the Truth · Nature Abides, Water Remembers · No One Resembles Themselves · Follow the Dopamine · Population Shrinks to One — the work unfolds as a recursive transformation across media, a feedback loop in which no gesture stays singular and no repetition stays identical. Four instrumentalists — bass flute, bass clarinet, viola, electric guitar with e-bow and pedals — surround the Ebru tray; a fifth performer is three streams grouped in one body: voice, marbling tray read by contact microphones and an overhead camera, and Max/MSP electronics. In the first movement the system learns to imitate: whispered phonemes pass to bass flute air-tones, a key click answers a consonant a beat late, never synced, always in echo. In the second the players speak, sing and finally shout through their instruments — two very short stories, Fredric Brown’s Knock and Monterroso’s dinosaur, broken into phonemes — while the tray drifts on as pure image. The third is a long inhalation that doesn’t return, built from aeolian tone, jet whistle, overblowing and flutter, the contact mics now live. The fourth is the only movement in which the Ebru performer does nothing: hands out of the water, voice silent, while the quartet erupts into a locked, restless loop — the chase. The fifth is the inverse of the first: performers drop out one by one, the phrase never returns, only its consonants, and those decay to breath. The marbled surface, accumulated across the whole piece, becomes the live score. The ending is the paper transfer — kağıt kaplama: a sheet is lifted and the pattern leaves the water. What remains in the tray is clear water; what remains in the room is silence.

Repetition is never duplication. Written in 2024 and revised in 2026, Echopraxia is dedicated to Collective Lovemusic, who gave the premiere at GMEM, Marseille, on 26 June 2026.