Cycles (1996)

Cycles is the fifth single from Silonics' retrospective album: Channeling Apollo/Art Dance Classics (1989 - 2001), which releases in June 2024. It features several works created in collaboration with choreographers for contemporary dance performances, plus some other experimental art music tracks, which are yet to be choreographed. Cycles is one the dance tracks...

Cycles was composed in collaboration with choreographer Vanessa Case and was originally performed as three separate movements for Guild Dance Theatre's show Begin Search at Melbourne University, 5 - 14 September, 1996.

Cycles' three movements are:

Cycle 1 - cicadas_Vocal Mass_cicadas
Cycle 2 - cicadas_Guitar_cicadas
Cycle 3 - cicadas_Ensemble_cicadas

Cycle 1, was included in Terry McDermott's eX•static events for live spatialized mixes of over 40 computer music composer's and sound designer's tracks, for the Experimenta Festival Club Lounge over a few nights in November 1996 and in eX•static for Melbourne's Next Wave Festival, as well as at PICA, the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, in May 1997.

Cycles was re-mixed into a single three-movement piece for further performances by Vanessa's dance ensemble at La Trobe University's Moat Fest, together with interactive video projections, in March 1997 and in Move It or Lose It for Ausdance at Melbourne's Royal Botanical Gardens in April 1997, which is also how we hear it on this album.

The Cycles dancers were Vanessa Case, Eliza Terry, Julia Robinson, Narelle Robinson, Jessie Huon, Angela Strk, Rebecca Horne and Mia Rappel.

Musically, the three movements explore the theme of cycles: cosmic cycles, daily life cycles of sleep, work, play and friendship and relational cycles, expressed sonically, through varied length looped sounds, to portray the ideas of recurrence, repetition and return. The dance illuminates cycles in ways relationships may occur, conveying meaning and connection through their movements individually and within the group, where some gestures are brief and fleeting and others are lingering and longer-lasting...

The sounds of cicadas frame each movement.

...c...i...c...a...d...a...s...

Cycle 1 contrasts the high pitched cicadas' quantum fluctuations with the bold entry of a deep baritone voiced singularity, that gradually expands in a multilayered, dense and multi-varied, seemingly static, but continually expanding inflation of the evolving overtone choral mass...

...c...i...c...a...d...a...s...

Cycle 2, emerging from the cosmic darkness is lighter, contrasting in a simpler texture, of strums and a single line played on synth guitar, picking out a meandering melody of recurring riffs, that become more active and energised, embellished by harmonic overtones, referencing the vocal mass of Cycle 1...

...c...i...c...a...d...a...s...

Cycle 3 is more active again, with new woodwind timbres of the flute and bass clarinet entering and interacting conversationally, playfully and perhaps argumentatively, polyphonically becoming increasingly entangled. Occasional vocal drones recall Cycle 1's expanding dark matter. The synth guitar from Cycle 2 entwines, merges, shifts, and interacts, as phrase lengths and loops of all sounds repeat and vary, sometimes combining with blended sustained tones, although some don't endure as long as others, but nevertheless become increasingly unified, developing into heterophonic variations with multiple cycles playing out simultaneously differently...

...c...i...c...a...d...a...s...

Take Note: Cycles sounds best when listened to on good speakers or quality headphones with a good bass response.