HOWL!

Untangling signal from noise, truth from lies, message from distortion has become our daily experience. Levels of disinformation are at an all-time high, as global agendas clash and reality sinks beneath the horizon. Technology bewilders us, even as we search for meaning using the same channels designed to distract and confuse us. How does anything
as coherent as a protest movement ever emerge from this overload? Yet, just occasionally, energy manages to flood the wires and people come together to oppose regimes that are evidently oppressive, and to recognise and confront injustice together, despite everything.

When alienation is pushed to unprecedented limits, how can the same force be reversed and made human again? The madness depicted in Allen Ginsberg’s mid 1950s poem: Howl mutates in Gabriel Prokofiev’s five-part E.P. of the same name, into something directed and urgent, outward-looking.

HOWL!, initially inspired by the ‘Arab Spring’, explores the explosion of recent technologies as a conduit for protest and opposition movements of all kinds, but also their ambivalence and tendency towards corruption and confusion. Composed at first as a score for American choreographer, Maurice Causey, and premiered by Luzerner Ballet, the piece then evolved over multiple live performances, including its Hong Kong premiere in
2019, which took place just a few hundred metres from the independence protests, and featured local clarinettist Linus YS Fung who here appears on HOWL! II – Separation.

For his main instrument in HOWL! Prokofiev deploys the raw tone of an early 1970s ARP Odyssey Synthesiser, whose oscillations and richness provide a contrast to the anodyne, homogenous sounds we have been groomed to prefer. The ARP is then layered and filtered through computer processing and distortion; HOWL! is a propulsive cascade of the rise
and fall of collective political emotion, mediated through the technology of the past halfdecade. The rise and fall of mutual vitality in sync, and in tension with the machine.