Uploaded July 2018 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Owen Green: Neither the Time nor the Energy (2018) for bowed cardboard and truculent electronics. Performed at Electric Spring 2018.

owengreen.net
electricspring.co.uk

Electric Spring is an annual festival of sonic exploration of cutting-edge practice in electronic music. The five-day programme of concerts, installations and symposia brings together a collection of people from diverse musical backgrounds to share their knowledge and perform music. The festival is curated by the Music and Music Technology staff of the University of Huddersfield.


/// Credits

Performed by Owen Green at Electric Spring, 23 February 2018 Phipps Recital Hall, University of Huddersfield.

Audio recorded by Alex Harker
Video recorded by Sam Gillies
Audio and video edited by David Velez


/// Program Note

The whole bowed cardboard thing started off as a bit of a facetious gesture, a silly way of supplying a computer with control data. However, the bow and box live nearer to the threshold of instrument-hood than I’d expected, and have yielded a surprising repertoire of ways of sounding and moving. Sometimes I even play it without electronics.

Neither the Time nor the Energy is the second piece/system I’ve done around the box. As a technical matter, I’m trying to see how much of a performance’s unfolding structure can be driven by my playing within a fairly loosely specified overall shape. In other words, I have only marginally more of an idea than you about what’s going to happen. It might sound as if it has three movements, and it will last for fourtneenish minutes. The electronics are almost wholly autonomous, in practice: expect me to pull faces of occasional surprise or bafflement.

As a more poetic matter, I’m still working my way through what all these sounds could do, musically. Among the vocabulary of the box are sounds ranging from the fragile and breakable—whispers, fields of clicks, animal moans—through the more turbulent—almost-gastric creaks and unabashedly abrasive squawks. Much about the soundworld is so reminiscent of those things we’ve become habituated to through our digital means, yet so blatantly of a different source. Perhaps there’s something in there about the stories we tell about ourselves through our toys.


/// Bio

Owen is Research Fellow in Creative Coding on the FluCoMa project, funded by the European Research Council. Owen ia active in a number of groups, including RawGreenRust, with Jules Rawlinson and Dave Murray-Rust; Sileni, with Ali Maloney; and Grey Area, with Sean Williams, Emma Lloyd, Shiori Usui, Nikki Moran, Armin Sturm and Dave Murray-Rust.