FOR JEN TORRENCE

for solo percussionist and Multimedia

Program Note:

The core inquiries of this piece have been circling for quite some time, tracing back to my first reading of Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, which Jen prompted during our first conversation back in 2017. We met that January in Oslo, Norway, when I was there for a short-term composition study, overlapping with our joint mentor Peter Swendsen. I had the opportunity to see Jen perform Peter’s composition, What Noises Remain, and was struck not only by her virtuosity, but by her ability to bring theatricality and extra-musical drama into contemporary concert music settings. The questions and provocations that emerged after reading Cyborg Manifesto have since been an ongoing thread in my artistic practice, spawning a number of musical and non-musical creative offshoots. When Jen and I reconnected at Darmstadt in 2023, I shared with Jen just how influential our 2017 talk about Haraway’s writing had been and asked whether we might create a piece together—one that explored threads of Haraway’s Manifesto, particularly–gender, queerness, posthumanism, and the electronic extension and mediation of the body. In doing so, I was curious about how we could continue challenging binaristic thinking and further theorize the cyborg as a way to reimagine identity as fluid, partial, and constructed—not fixed or essential, and inherently mediated by the technological world.

In 2020, I created Mx.Mechanica, a solo piece for drum machine and performer that imagined the human as a quasi-automaton—mechanized by the very machine they operate. This work laid the conceptual groundwork for For Jen Torrence, a large-scale multimedia piece that expands and deepens those inquiries. Drawing on Jen’s singular practice—at the intersection of percussion, physical theater, collaborative composition, and a deep engagement with queer theory—the piece unfolds within an activated landscape where the lines between body and machine constantly blur, creating a kind of cyborgian entanglement. The sound world spans a wide spectrum of acoustic and electronic music, incorporating elements from hyperpop, early electroacoustic music, glitch aesthetics, and kitsch-infused drum machine textures. Furthermore, the drum set functions as a quasi-feedback machine, with Jen’s body acting as a live filter—shaping, distorting, and mediating the oscillations between microphones and speakers. The score presents a series of choreographic and musical challenges: limb isolation puzzles, metric modulation exercises, and virtuosic glitch-music passages that push Jen to capacity within a reactive live electronics environment. The piece ultimately explores states of overload, fragmentation, and sonic excess—demonstrating the impossibility of the human body becoming fully mechanized. For Jen Torrence is not only a meditation on Haraway’s cyborg, but also a tribute to artistic kinship and collaboration, iterative inquiry, and the potential of performance as a space to investigate identity, embodiment, and our entanglements between human and machine.

This piece is truly for Jen, and was created through a beautiful collaborative process for which I am deeply grateful. The film was created via an analog, cameraless process by my longtime friend and collaborator Lua Borges, whose artistic voice and visual language I greatly admire. 

PRESS:

https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/en/ferienkurse/reader/twinnings/

https://internationales-musikinstitut.de/en/ferienkurse/festival/programm/twinnings/

PERFORMANCES:

Premiered by Jen Torrence at the 2025 Darmstadt Festival in Darmstadt, DE (July 2025)

Danish premier at the 2025 MINU Festival, Copenhagen, DK (November 2025)