"Headfuck" is an attempt to write music in a "universal" way. The score is folded into rules, which from a simple and short notation create more complex vertical and horizontal musical structures. The score is a set of commands that requires performing real-time operations and various perceptive tasks to render instructions for playing the instrument. These operations (ranging from counting, adding and subtracting to listening, looking and using senses otherwise) are feed with specific parameters. Various events are parameterized: other players' sounds (rhythmical or pitch characteristics), physiological functions (pulse, eye-blinking or breath cycle) or visual elements (audience features or light changes). Using these parameters musicians execute algorithms of the piece and generate events, that than become parameters for other algorithms, transforming players into interiorly dependant and interactive network and - given the random (e.g. eye-blinks) or relative (perception) nature of events - unfold the score in a chaotic way. However, development rules for that chaos are precisely notated and up to some degree iterations can be predicted, particularly in most basic individual phrases. What cannot be controlled compositionally is the evolution of the piece: it isn't conducted or better said: it is conducted by multiple distributed units, synchronised with players’ heartbeats or perception.

Musicians have to make notation as they perform it and in the course of this process use their minds extensively. Such minds’ engagement has important consequences for music: performers are left without the opportunity to label their sound emotionally, with most of the resources devoted to following score's rules - the sound needs to be produced automatically (which also affects the musical material that cannot demand complex instrumental passages and have to allow such simplicity). Musicians are given more rules that they can fully master and also of a construction that requires "parallel processing" - paying attention to multiple events and performing multiple operations at the same time. It is clear that players have to fail regularly and this struggle creates constant tension, which is even more amplified by necessity of focusing on occurrences like one's pulse or eye-blinks, resulting in almost meditative state in musicians (best reflected on their faces).

Wojciech Kosma
Wrong Ensemble