Temperament
Live performance for viola (electric violin), violin, electric guitar and electronic musician.
Created in collaboration with Anastasia Freygang, presented on her invitation for ad lib > vocalistsbodies, not vol2
A proposition and score by Arthur Poujois
Musicians : Josh Curtis, Hatty Taylor, Leticia Mader, Esther
Sonic interventions : Anastasia Freygang, Vaseline, Glow-wirM.
The Horse Hospital, London — Saturday 11 October 2025, 7–11pm
With Vaseline, Yuri Afasia, and Glow-wirM.
Temperament emerged from an invitation by Anastasia Freygang to intervene in the framework of ad lib > vocalistsbodies, not, an evening exploring presence, decentralisation, mediated bodies, and the porous edges of live sound. In response to this curatorial field, where artists absent, shy, abroad, dead, or disembodied were invoked as collaborators; Temperament proposes tuning as a ritual of dispersed attention, instability, and shared vibration.
A trio of musicians (viola (electric violin), violin, and electric guitar), moves through the space over the course of the night. Each time another performance concludes, they begin to tune.
This fleeting pre-musical gesture becomes the work itself: a field of tension, a trembling threshold where precision unravels and sound suspends itself between harmony and collapse.
Across the evening, Temperament evolves as a continuous reaction to its surroundings.
In every recording of the performance, Anastasia Freygang’s interventions (live DJ sets, sonic intrusions, drifting frequencies) thread through the tuning, disturbing it, provoking it, extending it.
Her presence becomes an unstable partner, an ambient force that the musicians must constantly respond to.
The result is a moving threshold between intentional sound and external interference, a conversation that never settles.
The trio’s amplified textures collide with Anastasia’s shifting sonic field:
the viola shivering with electric overtones,
the guitar entering microtonal friction,
the violin leaning into unstable intervals.
Each recurrence of tuning carries a trace of the previous one, shaped by these interruptions, marked by the imprint of what came before.
Responding to Anastasia’s call for stripped-back dramaturgical decisions = presence + decentralisation, the piece dissolves conventional authorship.
The trio becomes a moving perimeter rather than a centre.
Sound circulates; bodies displace; tuning becomes a shared process rather than an individual task.
Influenced by butoh tremor work and somatic listening, Temperament tests what happens when classically trained musicians allow their discipline to falter , when breath interrupts technique, when micro-shaking enters the hand, when intonation refuses to settle.
In this sense, the piece touches the Bataillean notion of sacrifice: the intentional expenditure of mastery, the offering of control to instability.
Temperament extends an ongoing research into sound as ritual, vibration, and relational presence, situated within the minimalist lineage of Michael Nyman, La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and Catherine Christer Hennix, yet pushed toward a darker, more embodied register.
A meditation on non-resolution, collaboration, and the fragile architectures of live performance.
