An honest, human and emotive response for now and the future.

Tonight Crash Ensemble play a selection of their [REACTIONS] commissions & postcard miniatures for the first time to a live audience, alongside sounds from across the globe… and… the first outing of a brand new piece ‘Standing Water’ by Kevin Terry, winner of the National Concert Hall Jerome Hynes Young Composers’ Award.

About the [REACTIONS] series:
“Amidst the onset of the global pandemic, we commissioned Irish & International composers from a range of musical backgrounds to write new works for duos within the group. Building on existing collaborative partnerships and cultivating and nurturing new relationships, composers were invited to create a musical response to their experiences, the current state and their thoughts for the future.”

About Crosstalk:

Crosstalk attempts to capture the feeling of trying to communicate across distance, both physical and experiential. As an Irish person living in Japan, my experience of the Covid19 pandemic is one of feeling split and pulled between two worlds: that of my own real lived experience of the reality in Japan, and that of my friends and family in Europe. While staying indoors during the State of Emergency, the online world became sometimes more real, and venturing out led to sensations of extreme cognitive dissonance. Communication between these two worlds was sometimes easy, oiled by the shared stresses and cares of the situation, and sometimes jagged, broken by the different on-the-ground experiences of it in different places. Imagine the now-ubiquitous problems of digital conferencing, with crosstalk, connection difficulties and misunderstanding, but applied to the process of communication itself. The piece takes the form of a kind of conversation, moving between these broken fragments and smooth easy chatting, punctuated by moments of an agonising pull between two places.