Collaboration with Joy Frempong for her voice solo project “Chance and Change“, a solo act based on voice, loop machines, synthesizers, field recordings, and elaborated especially for La Biennale di Venezia’s International Festival of Contemporary Music, directed by Lucia Ronchetti. The songs and ambiences will loosely move around the topic of what positive changes we could be able to achieve out of the unexpected and unwanted change that suddenly struck our lives and forced us to adapt, to improvise, to find solutions.
Joy Frempong: vocals, keyboards and electronics
Synthesizers and sound programming: Guglielmo Bottin
Additional production: Marcel Blatti
Live sound engineer: Martin Ruch
Production: CIMM (La Biennale di Venezia)
Change, Choice & Chance
Goodday, please meet my friend Change. He’s a good fellow except he tends to force himself onto people. But Change loves to hang out with another friend, Choice, and together they’re usually quite good company. Together they bring excitement, sparkling energy into dull conversations, they’re the couple that feed each other with inspiration while improvising a story that will then end with the perfect punch line. Change and Choice yeah, they will entertain a bar for a full night – and everyone will go out feeling better, feeling like they have no limits, feeling freed and very certain that they’ll never repeat any of their recurring mistakes. People who have become the impersonification of their better selves, carrying their potential on their heads visible for everyone – not with arrogance, but with healthy self-confidence that finally, from now on, everything’s going to be different. But when Change hangs out alone, he often causes distress. He’s responsible for nervous looks, for people fiddling with their smart phones even more unnecessarily than they already tend to do, sunddenly making panic calls to friends and family. People crying, people looking at what used to be as the holy grail – although they had been constantly complaining in the old days too. And when Change takes his sister Chance out? The first reaction is usually silence. Almost like at a meditation camp, except no-one here cares about meditation. It’s more this feeling of avoiding the topic, and going – ‘it doesn’t concern me, does it? If I just stay here, still, and do nothing, I can skip being part of this? If I continue as before, if I make myself invisible, this will be of no concern to me right? It’s not that bad, I mean, it’s ok. It’s always been ok. It will stay ok for a while.’ Change and Chance are more like a silent energy that pulls up a mirror in front of people. People can avoid to face it, look down on the floor, up at the ceiling, but they will always be aware of this mirror. Deciding to face it though might make Choice appear and add sudden dynamics to the situation. Now, when Change hangs out with his buddy Climate. Ohh, that’s no good news. They usually get into a fight and immediately Challenge joins in. Challenge speaks empty words, Choice and Chance pass by, get very loud and are yet often drowned by these empty words. [text by Joy Frempong, July 2021]