Future Race

Future Race is a six-minute fixed-media piece made in Istanbul in 2016, the third of my “race” pieces after Lemurian Race and Hyperborean Race — the only one about a people that does not yet exist. It was performed in concert for the first time in May 2023 in the Black Hall of the National Forum of Music in Wrocław, as part of the Akusma Forum’s Turkish programme at Musica Electronica Nova.

If the other two pieces look back at lost peoples, this one is an invented field recording from ahead: the sound of a future crowd. It is built from layered voices — my own, multiplied into a mass, speaking and singing syllables from no language, moving through a large reverberant space that slowly fills with them — over a pulse that is not quite a heartbeat and not quite a machine. Halfway through, the crowd begins to synchronise, and the piece lets you decide whether that is a choir or a march.

It is the earliest of my electronic works I still stand behind, and the questions it asks about the mass and the single voice have not gone away.