Sandeep Bhagwati: Anti-Kairos II (Montreal 2023) _TRAILER

Anti-Kairos is a cycle of works for 12 or more percussionists. All explore the pleasures of non-synchronous music. This version, performed at the Festival Montréal Nouvelles Musiques 2023 by the Percussion Ensemble of the University of Toronto, led by Aiyun Huang, uses live generated digital scores to unsettle the performers - except for the coordinated passage we see near the start of the video, each percussionist is conducted by their screen in a tempo different from all the others - and this tempo moreover constantly changes. The score actively prevents the musicians from "being together", or grooving. For to groove is to isolate oneself from most natural processes: they have no groove, and they move slowly. Anti-Kairos wants us to feel again, how even in music we can enjoy this openness...