CRASH SITE

When Yosef Molchayevich presented his musical dramatic work 5’44”, in which five performers sit onstage doing nothing for precisely five minutes and forty-four seconds, he was quite proud of himself. In his dissertation “On Enigmatic Music,” Molchayevich asserted his theory of Underdetermines, in which he called into question the notion of music as sound. About 5’44”, Mochayevich explained that musical silence is not true silence, because there are environmental sounds which occur during a given performance which should be welcomed into the musical fabric. One afternoon in 1964 while giving a lecture at the Institut Byezshumnoi Muziki in Leningrad, Russia, Molchayevich suffered an intellectual breakdown and rejected his former ideas. A brief silent period followed. Unable to stay silent for very long, however, Molchayevich later teamed up with American librettist Milton Babcock to create The Chandelier, contains only one actor who sings only one song: “Crash Site.” In a Playboy interview in 1965, Mochayevich explains, “The Chandelier is a kind of folk opera which is not an opera at all, but which rather is a song, which has chords, but no chords. It uses the metaphor of a. car crash to describe the way two people feel when they meet and fall in love. There is a lot of broken glass and blood, and things smashing and twisting and breaking gin slow motion. It’s very romantic, I think.”

Vocals: Michael Johnson
Piano: Michael Johnson
Drums: Derrick Trost
Bass: Nate Halloran
Trumpet: Cory Gray

Recorded in 2002 at Type Foundry in Portland, OR. Engineered and mixed by Adam Selzer. Mastered by Michael Johnson and Chad Crouch.