for string quartet & sampler (2019)

CLICKBAIT is about the internet, information overload, the effects of digital media on the ways we think. It’s about attention span, the feeling of constantly shifting your gaze from one object to another in an environment of rapid disorientation, and the delicate, fleeting moments of introspection that exist in the liminal spaces. It’s about whether four musicians are able, despite continually being distracted, to focus on one thing.

Whenever unamplified, acoustic sound interacts with amplified, electronic sound, there’s an inherent power dynamic at play. Anyone with a laptop and speakers is capable of producing music infinitely louder and more varied than a string quartet, either by creating sounds synthetically or sampling them from the internet. To me, there’s something precarious and fragile about the role of the quartet in this situation.

Marshall McLuhan said that a new medium ‘never leaves the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them.’ In CLICKBAIT, the electronics ‘oppress’ the quartet: they exert control over the players, constantly pausing and interrupting them, forcing them to randomly switch material or synchronise precisely to a metronome. It’s up to the quartet to resist (and escape) the oppressive power dynamics they find themselves trapped in.