Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, Saun Santipreecha, Luc Trahand
circa ten to the ninety (2025)
(two performers, digital chess board, MaxMSP, monitor, speakers)

Conceived by Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, and developed together with Saun Santipreecha and Luc Trahand, ‘circa ten to the ninety’ is an ongoing performance project rooted in a fascination with chess as a form of creativity. Drawing from the Surrealists’ exploration of chess both as metaphor for, and expression of, the tensions between order and disorder, chronos and kairos, the conscious and the unconscious, the work involves a game of chess played on a specially designed board that generates a relationally-modular audial composition. Each piece — king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, pawn — for both sides — white and black — corresponds to a distinct layer drawn from a musical suite congruous to its movement, and is mapped to specific squares on the board. With every move, the musical work emerges, shaped by strategy, imagination, and the players’ evolving choices, and thereby gives voice to Duchamp’s quip that, whilst not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists. Adding to this fluid interplay of sound and structure, the layers assigned to each piece possess a temporal signature, defined by an inverse linear function of the time remaining on each player’s clock. This temporal element infuses the work with a sense of urgency and transformation, as the diminishing time alters the pace and texture of the unfolding composition. Although bound by the rules of chess and starting always in the same high-entropy state, each performance becomes a collaboration by opponents through whose unbounded agency one of circa ten to the ninety audial possibilities is actualized and phenomenological time is expressed. The result is a work where order and chaos, sound and silence, strategy and serendipity converge in an ongoing act of creation.

For this first iteration of the project, Saun Santipreecha composed the musical suite sampling from two sources, electroacoustically-modified: a saxophone and an electric guitar. Variously stretched or condensed in time, and taking as inspiration Blake’s Newton (1795) – the aquamarine fauna and luteofulvous mineralia away from which Newton has turned, and his search, under the pressure of the cold ebullition, through a system of mathematical rules – Santipreecha created a suite that ranges from deep textural resonances to clusters of gamelan-esque ticking. In turn, this also pays homage to the prepared piano compositions of John Cage, whose later work, ‘Reunion’ (1968) serves as this project’s parental lineage. A multi-tonal haze intensifies and then slowly dissipates towards a certain audial resolution and final stasis.

The complex and meticulous audial architecture of the project is designed and engineered by Luc Trahand. Working in MaxMSP and interfacing with a digital chess board, Trahand constructs a dynamic isomorphism between the state of play and the musical suite, adding spatial processes and temporal signatures.

This project invites future iterations based on different musical suites composed by other artists.