Watch Online: 'Crosstalk' at Musictown Festival

Performed by Larissa O’Grady/Susan Doyle (Crash Ensemble)
Audio engineering by Adrian Hart
Video by Laura Sheeran
Presented as part of Musictown 2021

Amidst the onset of the global pandemic, in 2020 Crash Ensemble commissioned 9 Irish composers – established, up and coming and from outside of the contemporary music sphere – to write unique new works for duos within the group.

Composers were asked to create a musical response – a political or personal response to their experiences, the current state, or their thoughts for the future. An honest, human and emotive response for now and the future.

Also to be featured as part of New Music Dublin, 25 April 8.30pm. Click here for more info.

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.