ENS.2009.8 | 36′
2 Vibraphones, Drums
And I used to be such a nice boy.
Composed for two amplified vibraphones and drum set, Spiral Jetty comprises thirty-five minutes of complex interacting patterns arranged in—you guessed it—a spiral. These patterns travel through a constantly changing aural landscape, each musical idea returning at least once but always subtly altered and colored by a different harmonic field.
Spiral Jetty isn’t so much about the particular artwork Spiral Jetty as it is about Earth Art and the work and ideas of Robert Smithson in general. It’s about monumentality and the urge to make and unmake not only art but landscape. It’s about the way we see and unsee the world, and could take its subtitle from one of Smithson’s works: Strata: A Geophotographic Fiction. But mostly it’s about instruments playing really fast and really loud for a really long time.