Temperament
Performance score, The Horse Hospital, London, 11 October 2025
A proposition and score by Arthur Poujois
Created in collaboration with Anastasia Freygang, upon her invitation for ad lib > vocalistsbodies, not vol2.
Musicians: Josh Curtis, Hatty Taylor, Leticia Mader, Esther
Sonic interventions:Anastasia Freygang, Vaseline, Glow-wirM
The Horse Hospital, London, 11 October 2025.
Three musicians move through the space over the course of an evening. Each time another performance ends, they begin to tune.Tuning usually precedes music. Here, the preparation becomes the performance. The musicians return to the same task without arriving at a final state of readiness. Each attempt takes place within an altered environment, absorbing the sounds and interruptions of the evening.The instruments are brought towards one another, then pulled apart by the changing conditions around them. Anastasia Freygang's live sonic interventions enter the process, disturbing its direction. The musicians respond through adjustments of pressure, movement and intonation. Their trained gestures begin to accommodate what escapes their control.As the tuning recurs, the memory of previous attempts enters the next. What was initially a procedure for reaching agreement becomes a way of sustaining difference. The work unfolds in the interval between one performance and another, where the body continues to prepare for something that never quite begins.
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.
