Can’t You Feel It?
Music for an exhibition using orchestra, solo cello and looped material from a filmed 1950s LSD experiment.
About the work
In the 1950s various government agencies and members of the public experimented with LSD. One filmed experiment placed an apparently conventional housewife in front of a camera after taking the drug. What fascinated me was not the drug itself but the extraordinary change in her speech: social inhibition and the usual need to project a personality seemed to fall away.
The voice becomes disarmingly direct — almost as if one person were speaking to another without the usual social armour. The composition uses an extremely conventional repeated chord structure beneath recurring fragments of the interview, so that the same words can seem to acquire a different meaning each time they return.
My interest in the material is not an endorsement of recreational drug use. It is the laying bare of humanity: the moment when the need to act, impress or behave appears to disappear, leaving the natural tone of a voice speaking with unusual honesty.