The Failed Assemblage of Batroun Concrète: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Post-acousmatic Composition

Seth Ayyaz

Batroun Concrète 2.1 - 2.9 is a sound work by the composer Seth Ayyaz. Comprised of a score for live performances interleaved with electroacoustic parts, it emerged from a residency at the Batroun Projects art space in the north of Lebanon. The performance intended for 2012 was disrupted by the early cross-border resonances of the Syrian civil war. While it failed to materialize in a final form, its conceptual design and theoretical underpinnings are relevant to thinking the complicities of composition with its material conditions, specifically regarding site-specificity, live improvisation, field recordings, and studio-based practice. The work investigated how body-related cognitive scripts might speculatively structure sonic thinking. Wilfred Sellars’ philosophical distinction between contrasting “manifest” and “scientific” images of humankind, as discussed by thinkers such as Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, is applied here to sonic discourse. The proposed “biopsychosocial” image rejects notions of the givenness of a human listener-composer subject in favor of a de-subjectified symbiont contingently implicated in complex systems dynamics. This is also illustrated in relation to Keith Rowe’s free improvisation practices. The paper discusses how Batroun Concrète 2.1 - 2.9 leverages the notion of assemblage as compositional method; how materiality both informs and develops the composer’s biopsychosocial approach to post-acousmatic composition; and introduces key concepts relevant to issues at stake in the work: post-acousmatic, not-knowing listening stance, reflexive-reflective, interiority-exteriority, and reception-interpretation-action helix. By harnessing a specific assemblage of concepts, subpersonal and transpersonal processes, agentive objects, and acoustics found at the derelict site, the graphic score composed open-ended non-determinate structural couplings between elements that investigated the material specificities of the site. www.sethayyaz.com